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普通话语音系统对中国学生英语(1)

2013-11-02 01:02 [Abstract] Accurate pronunciation and intonation is not only the element to evaluate the effectiveness of oral communication but also the basic quality of a language learner. However, there are many pronunciation difficulties that have been encountered by Chinese students, resulting from the interference of their mother tongue—Mandarin. As Chinese and English belong to two different language families, they bear lots of differences in sound system as well as the similarities they share. So it is inevitable that students’ pronunciation is easily influenced by their mother tongue, leading to some common pronunciation errors. This paper explores the reasons for those common errors on the basis of negative language transfer by comparing the differences between Chinese and English sound system. Besides, it provides the teachers and the EFL learners some suggestions to eliminate the negative transfer to improve the students’ pronunciation.
[Key Words] pronunciation; negative transfer; Mandarin; English; sound system; common errors

 
 【摘 要】 语音过关是英语学习的关键，同时也是难点。正确标准的英语发音、自然得体的语音语调不仅是衡量能否进行有效口语交际的重要尺度，也是作为语言的学习者所必须具备的素质之一。但是，中国学生在英语发音过程中往往会遇到困难。这是由于汉语的普通话和英语属于两种不同的语系，在语音系统上存在很大差别，同时，由于在第二语言学习的过程中普遍存在着的语言迁移现象，学生在发音上容易受他们的母语，即普通话的语音系统的影响，对英语中发音上的一些差别不能辨别，或者在发音过程中倾向于用汉语中一些相似的音去代替，从而形成发音错误和语音偏差。本文根据语言迁移理论，着重探讨了普通话的语音系统对英语发音的负迁移，通过普通话语音系统和英语语音系统在元音、辅音及语调三个方面的对比，分析了中国学生常见的英语发音错误，并针对这些问题提出了一些解决方法。
【关键词】 发音；负迁移；普通话；英语；语音系统；常见错误
 
 
1.Introduction
Language is the most important tool for mankind to carry on communication, while speech is its corporeal outer covering, which relies on the social function of language. Just as the famous American linguist L. Bloomfield pointed out that:“The writing is not a language, but is merely the method to record the language by recognizable symbols. No matter what kinds of words we use to record it, this language will maintain its original form without any change.” In other words, one language may use several kinds of written words for records, but with only a few acceptable pronunciations.
It is clear that phonetics is the most basic element of a language as well as the grammar and the vocabulary that are closely related to it .To command a language and to utilize it freely, one should learn its phonetics item first. Learning English is no exception. [1]
There are a lot of factors that may influence foreign language learning. It is generally believed that “during the process of language study，it’s impossible for learner to achieve the target language directly without any interferences or errors.”[2]
For an individual learner, one must try to avoid to be influenced by his mother tongue, i.e., the first language, as learner of any language usually produces mistakes, resulting from the influence of their mother tongue, such as difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds. And one of the most difficult tasks associated with learning a foreign language is mastering the phonetic systems of the new language. This paper investigates reasons for those pronunciation mistakes on the basis of language transfer by comparing the differences between Chinese and English sound system.
2.The notion of language transfer and its influence
Transfer is a psychological term that is used to describe a situation where one learned event influences the learning of subsequent learning event. That is, a previously learned event can either facilitate (positive transfer) or inhibit (negative transfer) the learning of a second event.

（科教作文网 zw.nseac.com整理）

Language transfer refers to a situation where the learning of a skill in one language transfers to a second language. Transfer can either have positive transfer and negative transfer. According to the definition of positive transfer, it is helpful to understand and command another kind of language study, especially when both the first language and the second language have something in common in certain aspects. For example, learning to read in Spanish will facilitate the ability to learn to read in English for an individual who speaks Spanish and is learning English. Oppositely, negative transfer, which is the interference of the first language in the second language learning, has the negative effect to another kind of study. It usually impedes language learning and leads to some errors. The more differences there are between these two languages, the greater influence it will have.
The number of learning English as a foreign language (EFL) students has been increasing dramatically in schools in China in recent years. Most of the Chinese students learn English as one of their basic courses in school, it is inevitable that their learning will be influenced by their mother tongue.
For Chinese EFL learners, language transfer widely exists in the process of learning and causes them to project the features of their own language onto the target language. As they cannot easily get rid of the interference of their mother tongue, they learn English passively and still keep the same language habits and the Chinese way of thinking while learning, resulting in some common errors or sometimes the existence of the so-called Chinglish.
For example, if one has developed good reading skills in Chinese, he is likely to be able to apply these skills when reading English (One useful reading skill is the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context. Another one is the ability to decide which new words in a text are important to look up in the dictionary and which words can safely be ignored.). The level of proficiency reached in the first language influences the development of their proficiency in the second language.

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Many Chinese EFL learners can’t help to relate their phonetics knowledge of the mother tongue to that in English, trying to find some similarities of them in order to learn and master English phonetics in the process of learning, as some of the pronunciations of Chinese phonetic symbols are surprisingly similar to their English counterparts. [3] And this reflects the positive transfer in the second language learning. However, many of the English phonetics sounds fail to find their Chinese counterparts, such as /ð/. So when those learners who are lack of strict pronunciation imitation or training usually come across some blockings in English pronunciation they are very likely to find some similar phonetic sounds in their mother tongue as substitutes, henceforth, causing the pronunciation deviation and pronunciation errors, which reflects the negative transfer in the process of the second language learning.
As negative transfer is caused by the differences in these two languages, this paper will mainly discuss the negative influence of the Chinese sound system on English pronunciation of Chinese students on the theory of negative language transfer.
3.Contrastive analysis of Mandarin Chinese and English Sound System
English and Chinese belong to two language systems with significant differences. English is a Germanic Language of the Indo-European Family, while Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan language family. They share many similarities. As spoken Chinese comprises many regional varieties, the Chinese language referred to in my paper is Mandarin, the Modern Standard Chinese, which is a hybrid of linguistic units embodying the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect, known as “Putonghua” (general language) in Mainland China.
The differences between Chinese and English lie in terms of phoneme, tone, intonation, rhythm, and juncture. English is prominence-related while Chinese tone-determined. All implied possible Chinese-based transfers in all these aspects into the learning English as a foreign language. （科教作文网http://zw.nseAc.com）
Chinese adopted a system of phonetic symbols to transliterate Chinese ideograms into the Roman alphabet since 1958. In Chinese, a single character represents one syllable. For example, the character “妈” (meaning mom) is spelled “mā”. However, Most Chinese words are composed of two characters-syllables. For example, the word “母亲” (meaning mother) is a two-syllable word, which is spelled “m“q‰n”A Chinese syllable has a vowel with/without a consonant before. There are no close syllables and consonant clusters in Chinese pronunciation
In spelling a character in Pinyin, we put a consonant and a vowel together.
The Chinese Pronunciation System (called “Pin Yin” in China) is similar in some way to that of English, and different in other – although it uses the same set of alphabet, in many cases it sounds differently.
Chinese has 35 vowels and 21 consonants, and the former sound most differently from English.
3.1 Vowels
“A vowel is a speech sound in which the breath is let out without any stop or closing of the air passage or throat that can be heard.”[4] It is produced by comparatively open configuration of the vocal tract. Unlike a non-vowel (consonant), a vowel can be sounded on its own. A single vowel sound forms the basis of a syllable, although two adjacent vowel sounds can be blended together into a single syllable diphthong. 
In many languages, vowels that are adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum. While in English, vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels (all vowels are considered phonemically oral).
There are six vowels and twenty-nine compound vowels in Chinese.
They are: B, o, e, i, u. <
iB,UB,Uo,ie,e<,Bi,UBi,ei,Uei,Bo,iBo,oU,ioU,Bn,iBn,UBn,<Bn,en,in,Uen,<n, Bng,iBng,UBng,eng, ing,Ueng,ong.,iong
In Chinese phonetics, nine nasal sound vowels (Bn, en, in, un, Bng, eng, ing and ong) are treated as vowels, but in reality, they are combinations of vowels and consonants, such as “n” and “ng” sound. “n” sound is created by tongue tip touching the upper frontal part of palate, while the sound comes through the nose, like English word “navy” is pronounced, or “ton” is pronounced. As the Chinese phonology does not use much of consonants after the vowels, except in this case of “n” and “ng” sounds, these nine vowels plus “n” and “ng” sounds were lumped together as vowels. （科教范文网 fw.nseac.com编辑发布）
In English, vowels are sounds in which there is no obstruction to the flow of air as it passes from the larynx to the lips in the pronunciation. As well as Chinese is, English is fairly rich in vowels, having at least seven short vowels and seven long vowels. The vowel sounds themselves are described in terms of tongue height and front-to-back in the mouth. There are twenty vowels in English, among which twelve are pure vowels and eight are diphthongs. The English pure vowels can be classified according to the height of the raised part of the tongue, the part of the tongue raised and the position of the lips, i.e. whether they are rounded or unrounded.
Below are two tables showing the similarities and differences between some English vowels and Chinese vowels. 
Table 1 Vowels similarities in Chinese and English

Table 2 Vowels comparison in Chinese and English [5]

 

 

 

 

 

3.2 Consonants
Chinese consonants are: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s,y,w.
Most of the soundings of the consonants in Chinese are quite similar to those English consonants, although there are a few exceptions. For example, “b” sounds /b/ as in “banana”, “p” sounds /p/ as in “people”, and “s” sounds like /s/ as in “maps” etc, yet “t” doesn’t sound like the pronunciation of the English /t/ as in “but”.
There are twenty-six consonants in English, including six stops, nine fricatives, two affricates, three nasals, two glides, two liquids and two semi vowels. They can be classified according to the points of articulation, the manners of articulation and the state of the vocal cords. Besides all of the English consonants, /b/,/d/,/g/, /v/, /z/, /V/, /T/, /l/, /r/, /j/ and /w/, others are unvoiced.
Table 3.Consonants similarities in Chinese and English

Table 4. Consonants comparison in Chinese and English[6]
Chinese English 
 

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