Back
 CE  Vol.4 No.6 , June 2013
Analysis on Sichuan College Students’ Segmental Phoneme Errors
Chuandong Ma, Lunhua Tan
Show more
Abstract: The negative transfer of mother tongue has a big influence on the students in Sichuan when they learn English pronunciation. Based on the contrast analysis and error analysis theory, this paper analyzes the recordings of students’ oral English test and summarizes the errors the students make when they learn the segmental phonemes: 1) Students use phonemes in Sichuan dialect to take place those similar in English; 2) Students confuse nasal consonant [n-] with lateral consonant [l-]; 3) Students find it difficult to distinguish ending consonants [-n] and [-η]; 4) A lot of students can not pronounce [r] correctly; 5) Few of the students pay attention to the quality differences of long vowels and short vowels; 6) Many students mispronounce the combinations of consonants [f, v, s, z, r, h, k, g] + [i, i:]; 7) In [s + p/t/k] combination, students give a strong aspiration for [p/t/k]; 8) Students like to add a vowel sound in the consonant clusters; 9) They sometimes add a vowel after the ending consonants.
Keywords: English Pronunciation; Segmental Phoneme; Language Transfer; Error Analysis; Contrast Analysis
Cite this paper: Ma, C. & Tan, L. (2013). Analysis on Sichuan College Students’ Segmental Phoneme Errors. Creative Education, 4, 415-417. doi: 10.4236/ce.2013.46059.
References

[1]   Cui, R. C. (1996) Sichuan dialect and bashu culture, Chapter Three. Sichuan official language. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press.

[2]   Gimson, A. C. (1970). An introduction to the pronunciation of English (2nd ed). London: Latimer Trend & Co. Ltd.

[3]   Fries, C. C. (1962). Teaching and learning English as a foreign Language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

[4]   Wang, C. M. (1990). Applied psycholinguistics. Changsha: Hunan Education Press.

[5]   O’Connor & Arnold (1961). Intonation of colloquial English (2nd ed). Longman.

[6]   Ellis, R. (1999). The study of second language acquisition. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Languages Education Press.

[7]   Odlin, T. (2001). Language transfer. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Languages Education Press.

[8]   Xu, T. F., Yu , X. M., & Sun, W. B. (1985). Modern English phonetics. Xi’an: Shanxi People Publishing House.

 
 
Top