Negative Transfer of Sichuan Dialect in English Vowel Acquisition

In China, English learners in different dialectal areas face distinctive challenges against pronunciation learning. The negative transfer of Chinese dialects to English pronunciation needs to be intensively studied and analyzed. However, most of the studies on the negative transfer of dialects focus on consonants and common characteristics of various dialects. Negative transfer in vowels seems to be neglected. In view of the inadequacy in the transfer studies of pronunciation, this study aims to explore the impacts and causes of the negative transfer of Minjiang dialect in Sichuan province in the process of Chinese students learning to articulate English vowels. The research instruments were an acoustic test and a questionnaire survey among local high school students. The results show that vowel pronunciation of the sampled students was mainly characterized by tongue deviation, the small opening degree of the mouth, and indiscrimination between long and short sounds, as well as the substitution of similar dialect finals. These problems were caused by the negative transfer of dialect pronunciation habits and students' vague phonetic awareness.