1.Some serious pronunciation problems in my students’phonetics and trace to their dialect
My students speak both Baoji dialect and Putonghua.Putonghua is the standard language used widely in school.But when they get home, they often speak Dialect with theirparents. So both these languages influence their English phonetics. Sometimes the first language has the positive transfer,but mostly the negative. Tracing the students’pronunciation,I can roughly divide the problems into the following situations.
1.Students can’t pronounce all the phonetic symbolsclearly, especially nasals.
They often make a strong accent, they mix /e/and /n/ together, /m/ and /e/ together . Such as the words :“pen, member ”, they may pronounce like the Chinese words: “ 朋”,“蒙波”. This phenomenon maybe result from their own dialectal accent. In the north of China, especially in Baoji,people usually speak with a heavy accent. They often readsome pronunciations “en, in, …”as “eng, ing, …”. So itisn’t hard to understand why they make the strong accent inEnglish.
2.Stress and intonation.
One common problem is that many students take greatpain to improve the English sounds they produce while neglecting stress and intonation, but when we communicatewith others, stress and intonation play an important role inexpressing. Many students can’t master some words’stress,such as “obvious, diligent, interesting, hospital”and so on.Others can’t distinguish the rising and falling tones. Eg.“You know my telephone number, don’t you?”When theyread the tag questions, they use the rising tone.
3.Mix of some consonants.
They often read /s, z/ instead of / , ?/. For example,they read“mouth”as“mouse”,“thank you”as“ sank you”,“this”as /zis/ ,“ three”as /sri:/,even the students read“ Ithink so”as “I sink so”. Tracing their mistakes, I think because there isn’t any pronunciations in Chinese like / , ?/,so it is hard for them to learn .
1.Suggestions on solving these problems
1.Train the students’pronunciation and correct theirmistakes in the optitum time.
The evidence thus far indicates that person beyond theage of puberty do not generally acquire authentic pronunciation of the second language. We all know that great athletes,great musicians, and others have almost always begun to develop that skill in childhood, probably before the age of puberty. So we should take the opportunity to train the students’pronunciation in their beat learning time. And in thephonetics teaching, we should correct their mistakes in time.
2.Always compare the English pronunciation and toneswith Baoji Dialect in the phonetics teaching.
When we teach them the pronunciation of some difficultwords, we should find the differences between English andtheir dialect at first. Then we repeat the correct pronunciationseveral times, and also ask the students repeat to make adeep impression in their mind.
3.Build up an English atmosphere for the students.
Students who are in their childhood and puberty aregood at imitation. So an English atmosphere is important forthe learners. We can build up the atmosphere in the classroom in each English class. The English teachers themselvesshould speak English as much as possible. And encouragethe students to express themselves in English. Also, we canask the students to give a speech or tell a story before class.When they are talking in English ,we can discover the problems in their pronunciation, then we can give them some suggestions.
In all, students have many problems in the English phonetics . Our English teachers play an important part in solving these problems. We should analyze the reason and graspthe opportunity to help the students, make their pronunciation correct and perfect.
