Experimental Analysis Of Mandarin Tone Acquisition By Primary Learners Of Chinese Language From Countries Where English Is An Official Language

Mandarin is a tonal language while English is an intonational language.The role of tone in Chinese is distinguishing meaning.For instance,shareing the same Initials and finals,’李’ and ’力 ’ have different meanings because of different tones.There is no fixed tone in intonational language,but sentences with the end of rising tone and falling tone are different from each other.Students from English speaking countries who are learning Chinese generally consider that mandarin tone is the most difficult part to learn.Many students even have Chinese tone problem after several years’ study.English speaking countries include countries where English is mother language,such as the United States,Australia,and countries where English is official language,such as Zambia,Tanzania.This article only chooses students from Zambia,Jamaica,Garner where English is official language as the research object,studing comprehensively the tone acquisition by primary learners.This article has six sections.The first section is introduction.Introduction expounds the reasons for writing and the significance of the topic.It alse summarize the previous research on tone ontology and tone aquisition by foreign learners of Chinese,focusing on two aspects:tone perception and tone pronunciation.In the last of this part,the problems this paper is going to solve are given.The second section is the design and implemention of tone acquisition experiments.The design of the experiment includes objects,methods,materials and conducting time.The implement of the experiment tells how the experiment is conducting.It introduces the compositions of questionare,the process of experiments and the method to process data.The third section is the analysis of the perception experiment results.The error rate and error type of monosyllabic tone,disyllabic tone,three-syllabic tone are analyzed.When compare the learners’ perception performance in the above different syllables,we find that tone perception error rate increases with the increase of the number of syllables.There is consistency of error type in different syllables,which means the easily occurred error types in monosyllabic words also easily occur in disyllabic words.The fourth section is the analysis of the pronunciation experiment results.The error rate,error type,acoustic performance,native speacers’ evaluating score of monosyllabic tone,disyllabic tone are analyzed.When compare the learners tone pronunciation performance in the above two syllables,we find the front-tone error rate in disyllabic tone increases comparing to error rate of monosyllabic tone.The back-tone error rate is more complicated.The error rate of the back falling-rising tone even declined.Learners not only have tone patterns error,but also have serious tone domain error.At last,when compare the results of tone perception and the tone pronunciation,we find there is consistency between tone perception and tone pronunciation to a certain degree.The fifth section is the suggestions for primary learners from contries where English is an official English in tone teaching.The main suggestions are as follows:the voice input should be valued in the primary stage of Chinese learning;emphasize the awareness of tone domain;set priorities for the practice order of tone pronunciation;use Praat software as a supplementary means in tone teaching.The sixth section is conclusion.The obtained results of tone perception experiment and tone pronunciation experiment are combed.The research’s innovation and value are summed up.Finnally,the limitation of this study and suggestions for further research are proposed in the thesis.This study helps improve the situation that there is almost no study of tone acquisition by students from Jamaica,Zambia where English is official language.The suggestions offered in the last could guide the tone teaching for students from above countries,predict what errors these students would make,and solve tone pronunciation problems of learners.