The Influence of Dialect on Students’ English Pronunciation英语毕业论文.doc

The Influence of Dialect on Students English PronunciationAbstractNowadays, English is very popular over the world. Most Chinese students speak English with an accent of dialect. The phoneticians explored the reasons why they pronounce in that way, and found someway to solve it. After that they simply analyzed their features of pronunciation and the reasons why they pronounce like that. Pronouncing English with dialects, it is no denying that the influences of dialects on students hinder them in many sides.Key words: dialect pronunciation influence strategies摘要如今社会，英语在世界上已成为一种非常流行的语言。在中国，有一种现象，很多学生学习英语都带着地方口音。一些语言学家对这种现象进行了一些探索，并找到一些方法解决。之后并分析他们发音的特点与原因。带着方言的英语发音，不可否认它对学生的英语学习存在着许多方面的阻碍。关键词：方言 发音 影响 策略Content1. Introduction2. What the Phonology?2.1 The Phonic Medium of language2.2 Phonology and phonetics3. Suprasegmental featuresstress, tone, intonation3.1 Stress3.2 Tone3.3 Intonation4. Some Reasons and Features of Students English Pronunciation with Dialect4.1 Features of Pronunciation with Dialect 4.2 The Reasons5. The Influence of Pronunciation with Dialect5.1 The Listening Comprehension5.2 The Social Communication5.3 The Self-Confidence6. The Solutions6.1 Pronounce the Sound Correctly.6.2 Improve the Learning Speech Sound.6.3 Do More Listening and Imitating7. Conclusion8. Acknowledgements9. ReferenceThe Influence of Dialect on StudentsEnglish Pronunciation1. IntroductionTo study a language, we must learn it well on the basis of pronunciation, for the pronunciation is the basic form of a language. However, different nationality has different system of speech sound. When learning a new language such as English, people often tend to be influenced by their mother tongue or dialect unconsciously.In a certain extent, whatever the speech sound of a language people speaks, it is a custom of pronunciation to express ones feeling. （罗颖玲,2007） Chinese or dialect, which is used for a long term, has been formed as a deeply-rooted. It is inevitable that the dialect has an influence on Chinese students to learn English, the reason they are used to speaking dialect, no wonder that they learn English mixing with dialect unconsciously. Those why do those Chinese students who mixed with an accent of dialect. 2. What the Phonology?2.1 The Phonic Medium of languageLanguage is first perceived through its sounds. Thus the study of sounds is of great importance in linguistics. Naturally, linguists are not interested in all sounds; they are concerned only with those sounds that are produced by humans through their speech organs and have a role to play in linguistic communication. These sounds are limited in number. These limited ranges of sounds which are meaningful in human communication constitute the phonic medium of language: and the individual sounds within this range are the speech sounds. 2.2 Phonology and phoneticsBoth phonology and phonetics are concerned with the same aspect of languagethe speech sounds. But while both are related to the study of sounds, they differ in their approach and focus. As we have seen in the last section, phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified, etc. Phonology, on the other hand, aims to discover how speech sounds in a language from patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.3. Suprasegmental featuresstress, tone, intonation3.1 StressDepending on the context in which stress is considered, there are two kinds of stress: word stress and sentence stress. The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning. For example, a shift of stress may change the part of speech of a word from a noun to a verb although its spelling remains unchanged. The noun has the stress on the first syllable. This is exemplified in such as import (n.)import (v) Sentence stress refers to the relative force given to the components of a sentence. The parts of speech that are normally stressed in an English sentence are nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs, numerals and demonstrative pronouns are usually not stressed3.2 ToneTone is pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the focal cords. Pitch variations can distinguish meaning just like phonemes；therefore the tone is a especially important in what we call tone languages. English is not a tone language. Our mother tongue, Chinese, is atypical tone language. It has four tones. The first tone level(阴平)，the second rise(阳平)，the third fall-rise(上声)，and the fourth fall(去声). The role of the tone can be well illustrated by pronouncing the same sound combination such as “ma” in four different tones: m(妈) má(麻) m(马) mà(骂) 3.3 IntonationWhen pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. Intonation plays an important role in the conveyance of meaning in almost every language, especially in a language like English. English has four basic tapes of intonation, known as the four tones: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone and the fall-rise tone. The most frequently used are the first three. When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter of words matter-of-fact statement. The rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone indicates that there is an implied message in what is said. Compare the following three different ways of saying the same sentence:(1) Thats not the book he wants.(2) Thats not the book he 、wants.(3) Thats not the .book he wants.4. Some Reasons and Features of Students English Pronunciation with Dialect4.1 Features of Pronunciation with Dialect As we know, Chinese students speak English have some problems because of their dialects. For example, I looked a book about the dialect in Guizhou. To analyze the influence of Guizhou dialect on the English pronunciation, people had a survey of 30 freshmen in the school of Foreign Languages as follows:Wrong examplespercentphonemeWrongpercentexamplesi,i:70%eat seek feelit sick ridn,l63%name nest knifeleast lead life,46%teeth think faiththis with them ,83%dad lamp bagluck uncle rough w,v16%watch wail sweetvegetable five vile ei,e56%tale great breaktell men bed According to the survey have been given, the mispronunciation of students took up considerably proportion. Most students pronounced those words in a heavy accent of Guizhou dialect. It mainly attributed the problem to the habit of bringing their dialect.From the diagram above, it is obvious that most of the students were influenced by their dialect .1The most typical feature is that the students open their mouth small when pronounce.2There is no cacuminal in their dialect.3They dont know the difference between “/I:/&/i/”and “衣”.4 The words with /n/ are often substituted by /l/.5The linguo-dental in /and/ is pronounced in dental /s/.6They often pronounce / and / in pronouncing /a/.7Sometimes the semivowel(in pingyin)/w/ is pronounced in labiodentals /v/.8The vowel/e/ is often substituted by diphthong /ei/.4.2 The ReasonsAccount for the problems the students had, lets analyze simply the reasons why they pronounced in that way./i:/ and /i/When we say /i:/,it refers to the front of the tongue is raised to a height slightly below and behind the front close position while /i/ is pronounced with a part of the tongue nearer to the centre than to front . (孟宪忠，2006) The pinyin ”i” and the Chinese character “衣” are similar to /i:/ and /i/,however ,the front tongue of /i:/ in English phonetic sign is higher than in Chinese and so does the centre part of tongue of /i/.The “衣”in the dialect is equal to the pinyin “i” or Chinese character “衣”.Therefore, those students who pronounce a word with /i:/ or /i/ often do it with their dialect 衣 unconsciously because of negative transfer of mother tongue./n/ and /l/Like the “l” in Chinese pinyin, the lateral /l/ in English is similar to it .Some dialects in our nation have no difference in pronouncing “n” and “l” which need to practice more. (葆青，2004) In the dialect, the substitution of “n” and “l” does not change the meaning of words, whilst in English the phoneme /n/ and /l/ are different which define the meaning of a word.In this way，students got used to confusing the pronunciation of “n” and “l” in Guizhou dialects, thus nothing to be surprised at pronouncing English words with an accent of dialect./ and /The pronunciation of o is to raise soft palate so that the nasal cavity is closed; place the tip of the tongue close to the upper teeth; breathe out the air through the narrow passage, making a fricative sound; do not vibrate the vocal folds./ is about the same as that for / except that the vocal folds vibrate. The difference among/ & / and /s/ is that when pronouncing /s/,the blade is near the upper teeth ridge but not touch it .Some students do not understand the right position of pronouncing /, / and /s/,not placing the tip of the tongue close to the upper teeth so that they pronounced / and / into /s/.While the phoneme /s/ is similar to pinyin “s”, it is easy to pronounce / and / into “s”. Despite of the low rate of pronouncing /and / from the diagram I have given, attention should be paid on it./ and / The compound vowel “a” in pinyin is similar to the back vowel /a/ in English. The striking feature of /a/ is that no contact is made between the side rims and upper molars while the / and / do. Thus some students was confused by the pronunciation of /a/,/ and / ,which made them substitute the three phonemes for pinyin “a” .As “a” is the pinyin of “阿”,habitually the three phonemes are pronounced with “阿”./w/ and /v/ In English, there is no connection between /w/ and /v/. But in some part of Chinese dialect, the pinyin “w” and “v” in dialect have no distinction. Some students tend to pronounce “w” when pronounce “v”, such as verse./ei/ and /e/Dont open the gum too big when pronouncing /ei/, or perhaps it will be changed into“欸”Mandarin. As we know ,most characters in dialect are equal to Mandarin with the custom of pronunciation in dialect, no wander that some students put the “欸” into /ei/ . /ei/ is a glide from /e/ to /i/. Because of the mastering of the pronunciation place right or wrong, hey tend to pronounce /e/ in /ei/.5. The Influence of Pronunciation with Dialect5.1 The Listening Comprehension Many students personal pronunciation with the accent of dialect is very hard to be understood by other people. In terms of English, the pronunciation of which has many variations, such as English，American English. Mostly the articulation students learned is international standard one, therefore, some trouble emerge because of the various features of articulation. For instance, “1 Did he buy a (cart, cat)?2I see its a (hat, hut)”(孟宪忠，2006).With their primary experience, that is dialect, ambiguity come into existence for the /a:/ in cart and / in cat arouse vacillation whether to write down cart or cat. , influenced by dialect, / in hat and / in hut are not easy to distinguish, students tend to substitute their mother tongue for English .Especially in the exam of listening comprehension, when the English phoneme combination they got is not the mother vocabulary of match ,anxious feelings troubled them so that they stopped to guessing the meaning of the English words rather than grasping the ones of next part. The most possible consequence is that they nearly fail to get all the information. Rather, there come to a problem that some of the students want to give up learning English.We can see the dialect have an effect on listening comprehension, is usually neglected. Some students attributed it to the base of their English, but not considering the base of articulation about whether it is mixed with dialect.5.2 The Social Communication    There is an increasing number of people learning foreign language. Just because of this, the international communication is on the rise .When the two languages contacted, influences between them existed, which led to the misinterpretation especially the English pronunciation in communication.   Account for the different language family that Chinese and English belong to, in terms of speech sound exists many discrepancy especially the English. Chinese students, communicating with other in using the similar pronunciation to substitute for English, put their habit of Chinese articulation into English pronunciation. This makes other cant catch up with you, sometimes causing misunderstand and even make a fool of yourself. As a result of this, people cant communicate successively.   Li Ming, my classmate, speaks English with an accent of dialect profoundly. When he was a middle school student, it was not easy for our foreign oral English teacher to take with him freely. The English teacher asked him a question “whats your name?” He said “My la mis (My name is.)” the teacher asked again, confused. He replied the teacher in his originate way, which made the English teacher stood by his desk for half a minute. Eventually, we helped him out. In addition ,with regard to /n/ and /l/ , most of the people speak with the dialect may not articulate them correctly and precisely .For instance, when we say this word “A moth is flying in the light”, the word “light ”may puzzles other whether the moth is under the light or in the night .   In foreign trade corporation, having dealings with foreigners is common, which requires the workers having a good command of communicating with foreigners in a standard accent. Articulating with a dialect may leads the trade to fail or not fulfill as expected.   It is thus obvious that a successful communication with others lies in how you pronounced well without mixing with dialect.5.3 The Self-Confidence  Speaking in English with an accent of dialect may cause students to despise themselves. Naturally theyll have a feeling of anxiety when listen to English. The existing phenomenon in the dialect is universal. Some teachers and other students tend to be puzzled at one word or sentence they spoke out, which made them blushed and heart beat quickly .After having this experience, the articulation of them turned out to be a tonal modification that they pronounce abnormally, and even have a f