Acquisition of English monophthongs by EFL learners from Chinese dialectal region — A case study of Ningbo

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the acoustic features of English monophthongs from Ningbo English Foreign Language (EFL) learners. It attempts to explore the degree of phonetic transfer of Ningbo dialect and Mandarin onto English. With eleven English monophtongs (/i/, /I/, /e/, /ae/, /a/, /ɒ/, /ɔ/, /υ/, /u/, /⋀/, /ɛ/) and three similar vowels (/i/, /u/, /a/) in English, Ningbo dialect and Mandarin are examined in this paper. Further, the study adopts the Speech Learning Model (SLM) to induce the errors or differences caused by the dialectal accent and Mandarin. Results demonstrate that, as far as the tongue position of the vowels is concerned, EFL learners and American (AM) native speakers show a great divergence between each other; specifically, /i/ is more affected by Mandarin, and /u/ is more affected by NB dialect, which can be explained by SLM. While /a/ produced by EFL learners is similar to that of American speakers. Therefore, in dialectal students' English learning, both dialect and Mandarin could affect their English vowel system.