On the Negative Transfer of Chinese Single Finals to English Monophthongs Learning.docVIP

On the Negative Transfer of Chinese Single Finals to English Monophthongs Learning 　　【Abstract】In English， phonemes， defined as the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language， are used to distinguish meaning of each sound （Yule， 1999）. For example， long vowel [i：] and short vowel [i] are two different phonemes， which represents different meanings between the forms “heat” and “hit”. Pronouncing [i：] as [i] in the word “heat” will lead to misunderstanding to listeners. This phonetic feature doesn’t exist in Chinese. Thus， there is no doubt that learners confront with difficulties when pronouncing them. In this case， Chinese learners will employ similar sounds from the first language to substitute them， which will result in errors in pronunciation and meaning. In English teaching， it is found that learners are puzzled about such English phonetics and cannot pronounce them accurately. From the perspective of phonetic， the paper explores the reasons for those common errors on the basis of negative phonetic transfer， aiming at offering some proposal to improve students’ pronunciation. 　　【Key words】negative transfer； English monophthongs； Chinese single final 　　1. Introduction 　　English and Chinese are divided into two different language families， with English belonging to Germanic language and Chinese to Sino-Tibetan. They possess lots of discrepancies in aspects of phonetics， grammars and cultures as well as certain similarities they share. So phonetics is the key point to learn a language. As far as phonetics is concerned， Chinese influences students English pronunciations rather easily， finally resulting in some common pronunciation errors. However， phonetics is the foundation of this big project in the process of learning English. So， this paper will list several obvious pronunciation mistakes made by students on the basis of the theory of language transfer in the purpose of eliminating negative transfer to promote the students pronunciation.