The Negative Transfer of Chinese Phonology on Students English Accents and Its Impact on Accent Perception

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impacts of Chinese phonology on students who learn English as a second language from the production and perception sides. For the production side, this paper focuses on the impacts of Chinese phonology on students English accents, taking the phoneme // as an example, based on the framework of negative transfer proposed by Edward Thorndike. For the perception side, this work explores whether there is a correlation between the students pronunciation accuracy and accent perception. In this work, ten Chinese international students were invited as subjects for the experiment, and the matched-guise test was chosen as the methodology. The results in this work show that negative transfer did occur when Chinese students pronounce the phoneme //, and it seems that pronunciation accuracy doesn't correlate to their perception of accents. The findings have implications for English education and provide suggestions for Chinese students to improve their pronunciation accuracy as well as their perception of accents.