International Journal of Language & Linguistics

Negative Transfer of Zhangshu Dialect in Jiangxi Province to High School Students’ Acquisition of English Pronunciation
Wanlin Xu

Abstract
Affected by the negative transfer of Zhangshu dialect in Jiangxi Province, China, many English learners are prone to errors in the acquisition of English pronunciation. In order to correct students’ wrong pronunciation and improve their pronunciation accuracy, this paper chose 30 senior high school students from Zhangshu Middle School to analyze their English pronunciation. The research results showed: (1) students were liable to confuse long monophthongs with the short ones and misread English vowels [æ] and [eə]; English consonants [θ], [ð], [tʃ] and [dʒ] were likely to be replaced by dialectal sounds [s], [ts], [tɕʰ] and [tɕ]respectively; English nasal [ŋ] in [iŋ] was also easy to be mispronounced. (2) At suprasegmental level, students tended to syllabicate the codas and stress each word in a sentence so that the rhythm featured dialectal characteristics. Also, their intonation was invariable due to the effect of Zhangshu dialect.

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