Study on the Negative Transfer of Sichuan Dialect on College English Pronunciation and Intonation Learning

Liu Zhengrong

(School of Foreign Languages,Sichuan Technology and Business university, Meishan 620000 China)

Abstract: China is a country with many dialects. As the earliest language we learned, dialects will have a certain transfer effect on the acquisition of any other language. Sichuan is a large dialect province. Due to the unique pronunciation characteristics of Sichuan dialect, its English learners often have a more obvious Sichuan accent in the process of learning English pronunciation. Therefore, studying the negative transfer phenomenon of Sichuan dialect to college English pronunciation and intonation learning has extremely important practical significance for improving the pronunciation level of Sichuan English learners. In this regard, this article studies the influence of Sichuan dialect on the learning of college English phonetics and intonation from the perspective of negative language transfer. Based on the theory of language transfer, this article discusses from five parts: the first part introduces the research background and significance of the topic; the second part outlines the definition of negative transfer and its influence; the third part analyzes the influence of negative transfer of Sichuan dialect on college English phonetic intonation learning; the fourth part proposes coping strategies for Sichuan English learners against the influence of negative transfer in Sichuan dialect; the fifth part is to summarize the full text.

Key words: Sichuan dialect；College English；Pronunciation and intonation；Negative transfer

1 Introduction

In the process of human language learning, local dialect is the earliest language acquired by human beings, which has a profound impact on the acquiring of other languages. In other words, the learner’s mother tongue is an important determinant in the second language acquisition. As two different language systems, Sichuan dialect and English are obviously different in terms of pronunciation and intonation. As a result, learners in Sichuan area are inevitably influenced by the dialect environment, thus resulting in the negative transfer.

1.1 Background of the study

Language is the expression of human communication, the carrier of human thought and consciousness, and one of the important factors to promote the progress of social civilization. With the rapid development of the 21st century, globalization has become an irresistible trend. As an international communication language, English plays a significant role in the process of communication. But for many college students, it is very difficult to pronounce English words accurately, let alone speaking English fluently. There are many reasons for Chinese foreign language learners to obtain less results with more effort, and one of the reasons that cannot be ignored is the negative influence of dialects on English learning. That is to say, in the process of learning another language, we are often affected by the local accent, which affects the accuracy of a new language pronunciation.

“The mother tongue is a source of knowledge, and learners will use it intentionally or unintentionally to screen foreign languages”[1]. In the process of learning a second language, most Chinese students will be affected by the pronunciation habits of their mother tongue, especially adult students, most of them start to learn English from junior middle school. And their dialects have formed a set of firm habits of pronunciation and intonation. When learning English, we need to form a new phonetic habit. The old and new habits are easy to conflict, and students often unconsciously bring the old habits to English learning to cause interference. Therefore, mother tongue interference is the biggest difficulty encountered by Sichuan college students in their English learning. When learning English phonetics, they have difficulties not only at the segmental level, but also at the suprasegmental level. Sichuan dialect and English, as two different language systems, have obvious differences in pronunciation and intonation. Before mastering English language rules, English learners in Sichuan are often affected by dialect environment and cultural background, resulting in negative language transfer. Therefore, when learning English pronunciation and intonation, they often have a Sichuan accent, which is the so-called “Sichuan English”.

1.2 Purpose and significance of the study

This article mainly studies the Sichuan dialect and tries to find out its influence on the English pronunciation of college English learners. In the past 20 years, many scholars have studied the influence of Sichuan dialect on English learning, but there is less researches on the negative transfer of Sichuan dialect on college English pronunciation and intonation. Therefore, the author hopes to make some efforts in this regard and to provide some useful suggestions for college English learners in Sichuan. Generally speaking, there are seven areas in terms of dialect, and each area has its own unique pronunciation characteristics. In the process of learning English pronunciation and intonation, students from different areas are affected by the negative influence of dialect transfer. Therefore, the author of this paper will focus on the pronunciation characteristics of each area, compare the differences between Sichuan dialect and English pronunciation and intonation, find out the practical problems of college students in pronunciation, then analyze the potential factors of these problems, and finally put forward some useful suggestions in theory and practice.

In language communication, intonation can vividly show the logical relations and emotional changes in the information contained in semantics. In other words, pronunciation is the soul of a language, while words are just the body. The written language marked by characters can only be developed on the basis of spoken language marked by phonetics. Pronunciation is always the basis and focus of language learning, and plays an irreplaceable role in the process of language learning. Therefore, this paper is committed to exploring the pronunciation rules and characteristics of Sichuan dialect and English, so as to further realize the negative transfer influence of Sichuan dialect on college English pronunciation and intonation, and provide some reference for Sichuan English learners. In this way, students can have a deeper understanding of English pronunciation, avoid the interference of negative transfer of Sichuan dialect in English learning, and carry out effective English pronunciation and intonation learning.

2 Negative transfer

The word “transfer” comes from psychology and refers to the influence of one kind of learning on another. However, “transfer” is no longer limited to psychology. It has become a cross-linguistic phenomenon, and is also an important research topic in applied linguistics and second language acquisition. When learners actively learn a foreign language or passively accept a foreign language, they tend to transfer the form, meaning and their distribution of the first language and its culture to the learning of the second language[2].

Language transfer is caused by the similarities and differences between the target language and the language that the learner has acquired or has not yet fully acquired. It is generally believed that when some features of the mother tongue are similar to or consistent with the target language, positive transfer is likely to occur. Negative transfer, also known as interference, is often caused by the structural differences between the mother language and the target language. The greater the difference between the two languages, the more difficult it will be for learners to learn the pronunciation of the new language. In foreign language learning, the transfer occurred in phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, discourse, pragmatics and culture at all levels. And phonetic transfer is a common phenomenon of language transfer. In the process of second language learning, the biggest obstacle to phonetic acquisition is the interference of previous phonetic habits to the second language.

2.1 The concept of negative transfer

Negative transfer generally refers to the interference or inhibition of one kind of learning to another. It is usually shown that one kind of learning increases the learning time or the number of exercises required by another kind of learning, or hinders the smooth progress of another kind of learning and the mastery of knowledge. It is generally believed that when the characteristics of the mother tongue are different from those of the target language, the learners will transfer the rules of the mother tongue to the foreign language, and the mother tongue will interfere with the foreign language learning. At this time, the influence of mother tongue on foreign language is negative, which is called negative transfer. The greater the structural difference between the mother tongue and the target language, the greater the interference will be. The misuse of mother tongue knowledge will increase the difficulty of second language learning.

2.2 The influence of negative transfer

Since the reform and opening up in the 1970s, in order to pass the college entrance examination, a large number of students began to learn English. Although many students can get high scores in English proficiency test, they still can’t communicate with others in fluent English. For a long time, teachers tend to focus on word recitation and grammar practice, but rarely involve phonology, and have no expectation of learners’ oral English. As a matter of fact, pronunciation is an important part of language ability, and the study of pronunciation and intonation plays a significant role in English learning. Excellent phonetic foundation can greatly promote students’ learning effects in other aspects of English.

Judging from the effect of college English teaching, most of the English classroom atmosphere is dull. Teachers on stage sing solo shows, while students below stage are just mechanical records. In other words, students learn “dumb English”. More importantly, students have a strong dialect when they speak English. In fact, English and Sichuan dialects are quite different in pronunciation, so phonetic transfer is a common phenomenon. In this case, students often encounter many problems, such as inaccurate pronunciation of phonemes, misuse of English pronunciation rules, etc. The following aspects are common problems encountered by these students in the process of learning English pronunciation and intonation.

Firstly, the students’ pronunciation is not accurate enough. Under normal circumstances, influenced by Sichuan dialect, most students will not only change the pronunciation of English words, but also add vowels and syllables to certain words at will. Since Sichuan dialect and English are two completely different languages, there are obvious differences in pronunciation and habits. Therefore, Sichuan students are influenced by dialects on the basis of Chinese Pinyin, and use their inherent knowledge system to guide the pronunciation of English, resulting in negative transfer.

Secondly, students cannot use English reading rules correctly. The most obvious problem is that students cannot make use of correct stress, weak reading, and linking rules to read in English. As a matter of fact, English belongs to the accented rhythm language. In English, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and other words with practical meaning are all stressed words in a sentence, and the pronunciation of these words must be adequate, while other prepositions and numerals with no practical meaning need to be read weakly. Students in the Sichuan dialect area are used to speaking every word clearly. The result of the transfer of this pronunciation habit to English pronunciation is that the students’ word stress is confused and the sentence stress is not clear. This not only makes English lose its original sense of rhythm, but also weakens the emphasis function of sentences.

Finally, the intonation pattern is monotonous. English belongs to the language of intonation. There are four basic intonations: rising tone, falling tone, rising-falling tone, fallingrising tone. Different intonations express different emotions and meanings. In fact, the same sentence has different meanings when spoken in different tones. Therefore, intonation exerts a vital part in expressing meaning. Sichuan dialect is a tonal language. Each word in a sentence has a fixed pitch, and the intonation of the entire sentence will not fluctuate greatly. Therefore, many Sichuan students lack the fluctuation of intonation when speaking English, and their intonation patterns are relatively flat and monotonous. When choosing tone, students just consider the type of sentence frequently, ignoring the meaning and feelings expressed in the sentence. Especially when reading declarative sentences, the falling tone is always used. When reading the text, few people can use different intonation to express different feelings according to the meaning of the sentence.

From the above content, we can see that students will inevitably be affected by dialects and encounter a lot of difficulties when learning English. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon will not only affect students’ English learning efficiency, but more importantly, it will dampen their enthusiasm for learning English. Therefore, how to prevent students from being affected by the negative migration of Sichuan dialect to the greatest extent is a problem that needs to be studied and solved urgently.

3 An analysis of the negative transfer of Sichuan dialect on college English pronunciation and intonation learning

Sichuan is located in southwest China, bordering Chongqing, Guizhou, Gansu and other provinces and cities. The use of Sichuan dialects is not only limited to Sichuan Province, but also includes its surrounding area, Chongqing. Currently, about 200 million people speak the Sichuan dialect. In other words, about one-seventh of Chinese people speak Sichuan dialect. As two different languages, Sichuan dialect and English have obvious differences in pronunciation and phonology.

Therefore, in order to improve the oral English of college students in the dialect area, it is important to analyze the influence of Sichuan dialect on the negative transfer of college English pronunciation and intonation. The following part mainly analyzes the influence of Sichuan dialect on the learning of English pronunciation and intonation from the perspective of segmental level and suprasegmental level.

3.1 Segmental level

Segments refer to phonetic units divided from discourse flow. In pronunciation, segments refer to phonemes. At the segmental level, the influence of Sichuan dialect on English pronunciation is mainly manifested in two aspects: vowels and consonants.

3.1.1 Vowels

Firstly, students can’t distinguish long vowels from short vowels. There are four pairs of vowels in English phonology. They are [i:], [?], [u:], [?], [?:], [?]and [ɑ?], [?]. The vowels with dots are longer than those without dots. This is one of the distinguishing features of English vowels. Beginners often only pay attention to the length of pronunciation, ignoring the difference in sound quality between long and short vowels[3]. Generally speaking, when we pronounce long vowels, the throat is tense. When short vowels are uttered, the throat muscles are more relaxed. Therefore, some phonologists call long vowels and short vowels tight vowels and loose vowels respectively.

In Sichuan dialect, there are no long vowels and short vowels. In addition, the length of the vowels and the tightness of the muscles have no difference in meaning. Although the [i], [u], [o]in the dialect are close to the English long vowel [i:], [u:], [?:], there is no similar short vowel in the Sichuan dialect. Students may know that there is a difference between long vowels and short vowels, but they don’t understand their pronunciation parts. In the process of learning English pronunciation, students often find similar sounds from Pinyin and Sichuan dialect instead (table1). Therefore, students in the dialect area often mix long vowels and short vowels in the process of learning English pronunciation. The result of this pronunciation is that the long sound is not long enough and the short sound is not short enough. In fact, inaccurate pronunciation will not only change the meaning of words, but also make it difficult for the audience to understand.

Secondly, replace [?]and [?]with [ɑ?]. When pronouncing the semi open vowel [?]in English, the opening is slightly smaller than [ɑ?]. At this time, the mouth should be opened wide and the tip of the tongue against the lower teeth. Then the corners of the mouth should be pulled to both sides as far as possible to form a flat shape with tense muscles. There are only a few dialects in Sichuan that sound similar to [?], but the opening is slightly smaller. Except for Chengdu, most people find it difficult to pronounce the sound [?]correctly. Accordingly, many students often use [ɑ?]instead of pronouncing this sound, such as reading “back” [b?k]as [bɑ?k]. In addition, the [?]in English is generally treated as a central vowel. When pronounced, the middle of the tongue is lifted and the lip muscles are tense. However, this sound does not exist in the Sichuan dialect. Therefore, when students pronounce this sound, they often use the front vowel [ɑ?]instead. For example, students pronounce “hug” [h?g]as [hɑ?g].

Table 1 Vowels that sound alike in English and Chinese

3.1.2 Consonants

The phenomenon of negative transfer of Sichuan dialect is apparent in the process of students’ English consonant learning, and the pronunciation of many consonants is negatively affected by dialects to some extent (table2).

First of all, students cannot correctly distinguish [n]from [l]. The confusion of nasals [n]and lateral [l]is representative in Sichuan dialect area. In English pronunciation, when pronouncing [n], the mouth is not completely closed, and there is air flow from the tongue or one side. The pronunciation of the initial consonant [n]and [l]is not clear in almost all parts of Sichuan province. When they pronounce the nasal [n], it is often not a pure nasal sound, but sounds with the feeling of [l]. This is because when they pronounce the sound of [n], their mouths are not completely closed, and there is air coming out from both sides of their tongues or one side of their tongues. Due to the influence of Sichuan dialect phonetics on English phonetics, without the teacher’s correction and distinction, this kind of phonetic features will make students ignore the pronunciation of [n]and [l]in English. Students will mix them and usually pronounce [n]as [l]. For example, they will pronounce “night” [na?t]as [la?t].

Secondly, students cannot distinguish [h]from [f]correctly. According to surveys, these two sounds are one that most people in Sichuan and even the southwest region cannot distinguish accurately. In general, the sound of [hu]is rarely heard in Sichuan dialect. Here we take the pronunciation of Nanchong as an example. Most English learners in Nanchong find it difficult to distinguish between [h]and [f]. Under normal circumstances, students will pronounce [fei ji]as [hui ji]and [hua fei]as [fa fei]. Take learning English words as an example, students will pronounce “hook” [h?k]as [f?k].

Thirdly, students cannot correctly distinguish [v]from [w]. [w]belongs to bilabial, while [v]belongs to labiodental. When we pronounce it, our upper teeth touch the lower lip, which is basically the same as pronouncing [f]. Then, the airflow passes through the gap between our lips and teeth, causing friction, and the breath is weak but the sound vibrates. There are few labiodental [v]in Sichuan dialect. Influenced by the negative transfer of dialect to English pronunciation and intonation, learners will habitually use [w]instead of [v]. The most representative example is the pronunciation of “very”. Students usually pronounce “very” ['veri]as ['weri].

Fourthly, students use [s]and [z]to replace [θ]and [e]. In Sichuan dialect, [θ]and [e]do not exist. Therefore, in the process of English learning, some students habitually use [s]and [z]instead of [θ]and [e]. For example, students will pronounce “thing” [θ??]as [s??], and read “these” [ei:z]as [zi:z]. Although [s], [z], [θ], [e]are all fricatives, their pronunciation is different. [s]and [z]belong to the alveolar sound, [θ]and [e]belong to the dental sound. During the pronunciation, we need to put the tongue tip against the upper teeth, and the airflow will be hindered.

Fifthly, students cannot pronounce [?]and [?]accurately. There is no sound corresponding to [?]and [?]in Sichuan dialect. According to the investigation, Sichuan students are used to using [x]in Chinese consonants to express [?]. For example, students pronounce “shelf” [?elf]as [xelf]. This pronunciation sounds unauthentic and has a distinct Chinglish accent. However, most students do not understand the pronunciation rules, even English majors will mistakenly pronounce this sound.

Finally, students cannot pronounce [r]accurately. In the IPA, [r]is a frictional voiced consonant. When pronouncing, the tip of our tongues should be rolled up and the body of our tongues should be slightly concave. With the exception of Zigong, most parts of Sichuan do not distinguish between flat tongue sounds and warped tongue sounds. There is no initial consonant [zh], [ch], [sh]in dialects. It is generally replaced by the initial consonant [z][c][s]. The transfer of this pronunciation habit to English phonetic learning will make it more difficult for students to master the voiced consonant [r], which is often confused with another frictional consonant [z]. For example, they pronounce “room” [ru:m]as [zu:m].

Table 2 Consonants likely to be replaced by Sichuan dialect in English

3.2 Suprasegmental level

When communicating in English, we not only need to pronounce the correct phonemes, but also need to take into account the other elements, such as stress, intonation, rhythm, etc. These features are beyond the scope of segmental features, and we call them suprasegmental features. At the suprasegmental level, the negative transfer of Sichuan dialect on English is mainly manifested in four aspects: syllables, stress, tone and intonation.

3.2.1 Syllables

A syllable is the smallest phonetic unit that combines a single vowel element and a consonant phoneme in the phonetic language family, and generally takes the vowel as the core. If V is used for vowels and C is for consonants, the general language has the following four syllable structure types: 1.V, 2.C-V, 3.VC, 4. C-V-C. Nevertheless, the method of composing syllables in Chinese is relatively simple, usually a combination of initials and vowels. Each consonant in the consonant clusters in English has its own pronunciation process. When changing from one sound to another, the change is sudden and short, unlike the transition between vowels and vowels. There must be no vowels among the consonants of each consonant cluster, and no vowels should be added to the consonants at the end of a word. When Sichuan students pronounce English consonant clusters and final consonants, they are influenced by the composition of Chinese syllables and often add [?]or [?]habitually. For example, students may pronounce “soft” [s?:ft]as [s?:ft?].

3.2.2 Stress

According to the context in which stress is considered, stress includes word stress and sentence stress. First of all, let’s talk about word stress. English vocabulary is numerous and the composition is complicated. Due to the complexity of English words, the accent patterns of English words are also extremely complicated and difficult to master.

In the process of learning English for Sichuan dialect students, the common mistakes made by students in word stress are the position of mispronunciation. “According to the pronunciation rules of English, the word stress of most disyllabic words falls on the first syllable, and the word stress of only a few disyllabic words falls on the second syllable”[4]. Many students only consider general rules and misread English words (table 3).

In addition, plenty of students do not pay attention to the significant role of stress in distinguishing part of speech and meaning, so it is easy to mispronounce the stress of words. In English, there are many words that can be used as both nouns and verbs. The way to distinguish them is to give different stress to different words or parts of speech. Generally speaking, as a verb, the stress falls on the second syllable, while as a noun, the stress often falls on the first syllable (table 4).

Although most English words have their own stress patterns, in a sentence, in order to express feelings or meaning, some words are always more important than others. Therefore, the relatively important words should be stressed in the sentence, while the other words should be weak. In general, notional words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on are stressed, while function words such as auxiliary verbs, conjunction verbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions and modal verbs are not stressed. However, the Sichuan dialect focuses on making every word clear. The migration of this pronunciation habit to English pronunciation is mostly manifested as unclear sentence emphasis, which not only makes English lose its original sense of rhythm, but also weakens the emphasis of sentences.

Table 3 Words stressed on the second syllable

Table 4 Words with the same verbs and nouns

3.2.3 Tone

“Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords”[5]. The change of pitch, like phonemes, has the function of distinguishing meaning, which is particularly important in what we call tone language. In fact, English is not a tone language. Chinese, our mother tongue, is a typical tone language, which has four tones: Yin ping, Yang ping, Shang sheng and Qu sheng[6]. The tone of Chinese is fixed on each syllable, and the change of tone can distinguish the meaning of words. For example, [da]has four different tones: [dā], [dá], [dǎ], [dà]. These four different tones all represent different meanings.

The same is true for Sichuan dialect. Since English words do not have a fixed tone, tonal changes are more flexible and can fluctuate greatly[7]. However, because Chinese characters and Sichuan dialects have fixed tones, their intonation does not change much. As a result, they try to read English in the same way, and to make each syllable occupy the same time, which leads to the loss of English rhythm. There is an example as follows: When students in the Sichuan dialect area read “Mark is an excellent student”, they are prone to emphasize each sound in the sentence and read it as “′Mark ′is ′an ′excellent ′student”. Words with single quotes indicate stressed syllables. This will not only make the listener feel bored, but also make it difficult for them to grasp the speaker’s points.

3.2.4 Intonation

“When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in insolation, they are collectively known as intonation”[5]. English is an intonation-based language. Native English speakers often express their attitudes and feelings through changes of intonation. Individual English words have no fixed pitch and pitch changes, even if there are pitch changes, it will not affect the meaning of the word. For example, “mother” can be pronounced in four tones like Chinese, but no matter how you pronounce it, “mother” is still “mother”. Although the meaning of the word has not changed, the tone has changed to a certain extent. That is to say, the tone of English mainly changes the tone, but does not change the basic semantics.

There are four basic intonations in English: the rising tone, the falling tone, the rise-fall tone, and the fall-rise tone. The most commonly used are the first three. The same sentence may have different meanings in different intonations. Generally speaking, a falling tone means a direct statement of facts; a rising tone means doubt; a falling tone often indicates that there is implicit information in the content.

However, there are only three types of intonation in Sichuan dialect: flat tone, rising tone, and falling tone. Each word in the sentence has a fixed intonation, and the intonation of the sentence is only adjusted according to the intonation of the last syllable at the end of the sentence. In general, there is no rise or fall in the intonation of the entire sentence. However, in English, intonation plays an important role in expressing meaning. Due to the different positions of emphasis, the same sentence usually expresses different meanings[8]. For example, “Tina witnessed Leo killing the man”. If the stress is on “Tina”, it means that Tina and not others saw Leo committing a crime. If the stress is on “Leo”, this sentence emphasizes that Leo and not someone else killed the man. But if the stress is on “the man”, it means that only that man is the victim, not the others. So we can see from the above example that when we speak English, the content we emphasize is different, and the intonation will be different accordingly.

Nonetheless, most students are not clear about the usage of various tonal patterns in English. Therefore, almost without exception, they not only read the same pitch of each syllable but also believe that general interrogative sentences use rising tones, and special interrogative sentences and declarative imperative sentences use falling tones.

4 Coping strategies

From what we have analyzed above, we can find that the negative transfer of dialects on English phonetic learning involves many aspects. Although it is not realistic to eliminate the negative transfer of dialects on English learning, we can take more measures to avoid the interference of dialects to the greatest extent.

4.1 Conducting imitation exercises.

To reduce the impact of negative transfer of Chinese on oral English, the fundamental way is to input a lot of English, supplemented by a lot of practice to form a good sense of language, and to establish a set of English cognitive grammar system.

Most students’ learning of English pronunciation is limited to text reading and recitation, which lacks systematic imitation exercises. Actually, imitation is a significant way to learn English pronunciation. Students should make full use of the advantages of the Internet to practice English. They can practice pronunciation by listening to English news, English songs or watching original English movies. “The underline is how English learning helps the students have an understanding and appreciation of how the language is used by the native speakers”[9].

When imitating, students should imitate sentence by sentence and pronounce strictly according to the pronunciation and intonation in the audio. Do not change the pronunciation in the audio according to their usual habit of reading or speaking. At the same time, write down the mistakes and practice them over and over again until they fully absorb the relevant knowledge and have the corresponding pronunciation ability. In addition, students can record their own imitations and seek help of teachers, and accept the guidance and correction of teachers, which will help them to make greater progress.

4.2 Standardizing Chinese pronunciation

The English pronunciation of students is directly affected by their mother tongue. In other words, English learners will encounter many difficulties if their mother tongue pronunciation is not properly pronounced. For example, if students in the Sichuan dialect area want to speak Chinese well, they must learn to distinguish between nasals and lateral, front and back nasals, retroflex nasal and flat tongue etc. Generally speaking, students with poor mandarin have relatively poor English pronunciation. Therefore, to take advantage of the positive influence of Chinese on English pronunciation, corresponding measures must be taken.

First of all, students need to understand the difference between their pronunciation and mandarin. The first thing they need to do is to find a suitable frame of reference. For example, listen to the radio, watch TV, or listen to people with standard mandarin. When students find that their pronunciation is different from others, they should begin to practice pertinently. In fact, the pronunciation problems of students in Sichuan dialect areas are mainly focused on nasal pronunciation and tongue curling. Therefore, in the process of daily communication, when it comes to these words, students need to pay attention to and seriously correct them.

The second is to conduct a lot of exercises to standardize the pronunciation of Chinese. It is not enough to find the difference between students’ pronunciation and mandarin, the most significant thing is to practice more. Students can read some speeches or reading materials before going to bed every night. They don’t need to spend much time reading aloud, but they should try to pronounce every word correctly, especially in daily life. When encounter some pronunciation problems, students should pay more attention and slowly correct them. If they prefer to slow down rather than pronounce the wrong sound. Over time, they will be able to correct it.

4.3 Cultivating good learning habits

The first year of the university is a significant stage for students to master the basic skills of English[10]. In addition, effective English learning is inseparable from good learning habits and learning methods. Therefore, the first thing students should do is to learn English pronunciation knowledge and understand the rules of English pronunciation. Quite a few students have errors in pronunciation and intonation learning for they do not thoroughly understand the basic knowledge of pronunciation and intonation, and mistakenly equate similar Chinese pronunciation with English pronunciation.

Secondly, pay attention to distinguish the differences between dialects and English pronunciation. For example, the parts of English pronunciation, the tightness of the oral muscles, the opening and closing of the oral cavity are all places that must be paid attention to. As long as these differences and easily confused places are clarified, students will be able to learn English pronunciation more smoothly. More accurate English pronunciation ability effectively eliminates the negative transfer of dialect on English pronunciation acquisition.

Thirdly, students should practice constantly. For one thing, in addition to reading aloud, students can also train themselves by retelling. In fact, retelling is one of the most effective ways to improve oral English without conversation. For the other thing, many students can actively participate in extracurricular activities. There are so many colleges have carried out colorful English activities, such as speeches and dubbing competitions. Students should actively seize these opportunities to exercise themselves and improve their English expression ability in practice.

Generally speaking, the improvement of spoken English is a long-term process and cannot be achieved overnight. For one thing, students are required to pay attention to the training of pronunciation and intonation, carry out a lot of oral practice and cultivate good English learning habits. For another thing, it is necessary to standardize the pronunciation of Chinese so as to help them reduce the negative transfer of dialects and improve the oral proficiency of English learners.

5 Conclusion

In today’s society, English is playing an increasingly important role. Since Sichuan Province is located in the southwest, English teaching is relatively backward, and students inevitably have many problems with pronunciation. The causes of these problems cannot be separated from the influence of dialect. In fact, the language transfer inevitably occurs in the process of second language acquisition. For both English learners and English teachers, it is necessary to pay attention to the negative transfer influence of Sichuan dialect on English pronunciation and intonation learning.

Through the study and analysis of Sichuan dialect and English pronunciation and intonation, the following conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, there are obvious differences in phonetic structure between Sichuan dialect and English. Secondly, Sichuan dialect has a negative transfer effect on English pronunciation and intonation learning at the segmental level and suprasegmental level. Based on the theory of language transfer, this paper makes a comparative analysis of the different characteristics of Sichuan dialect and English. The author summarizes the influence factors of Sichuan dialect on college English pronunciation and intonation learning from six aspects: vowels, consonants, syllables, stress, tone and intonation, and puts forward the corresponding learning strategies, which provide some reference for English learners in Sichuan dialect area.

In short, transfer is a common phenomenon in language learning. As long as we adopt appropriate methods and practice more, we can overcome the negative transfer of Sichuan dialect on college English pronunciation and intonation learning to the greatest extent.

This paper has been successfully conducted and attained the results as it aims to. However, just as a coin has two sides, every study has its valuable significance and limitations. The limitations of this research mainly lie in the following two parts. Firstly, as time is limited, the number of subjects chose to take apart in this analyze is small, Sichuan is consisted of many counties, which means that it has many different kinds of dialects. And the accent of the city area may not be the most representative one of Sichuan. Secondly, as the present scientific research level of the author limited, limitations and shortcomings of this paper cannot be avoided. Therefore, various comments on this paper are welcome.