An Analysis Of The Chinese Phonetic Errors Of Tanzania Students With The Level Of Elementary Chinese And Giving The Teaching Strategies

With the rise of China as a dominant nation on the world stage,the spread of Chinese language education is faster than ever.Tanzania has been witnessing a growing number of passionate Chinese language learners in the recent years.The Confucius Institute based in Dodoma University has been fostering innumerable Chinese language learners,providing opportunities to outstanding students to further their study in China.Tanzanian students are bilingual in Swahili and English and these languages have a considerable impact on their Chinese pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar.Language learning is an integrated process and good pronunciation is one of its most important aspects of it.The author has been working as a Chinese language Teacher for about a year as part of his internship in the Confucius Institute at Dodoma University.The experience gained through teaching Chinese phonology in the Confucius Institute forms much of the basis of this thesis.This thesis also makes use of second language acquisition theories like contrastive analysis,error analysis,interlanguage theory etc.The holistic analysis of initials,finals and tones was made through recordings and perception tests of 20 beginner's level Chinese language learners,followed by accurate description of their error patterns in pronunciation,supported by Praat software for statistical analysis.Finally,the author integrates into this thesis his own teaching experience and related research papers,followed by suggestion of relevant teaching strategies.In the introductory section of the thesis,the author puts forth the reasons behind the choice of his research topic,along with a general narrative on previous related researches,significance of the research topic,methods and theories used therein,and the sources of the corpora.This thesis is divided into three sections.The first section involves a comparative analysis of the phonetic systems of Chinese,English and Swahili languages.The sub-sections introduce the consonants and vowels of Chinese,English and Swahili languages followed by a general prediction of the kind of errors that may be generated due to the differences between these languages.The second section revolves around the tests made on the beginner's level Chinese language learners of Tanzania in their grasp of initials,finals and tones,followed by analysis of the resulting data.The author makes use of perception tests and phonetic experiments to make statistical analysis and computation of errors in Chinese phonemes,arranging them according to the error rate which stands as a reference work for teaching of initials,finals and tones.Based on the findings of the comparative analysis of the phonemes of the three languages in the first section and the data obtained through the research analysis in the second section,the third section puts forth relevant and effective teaching strategies of Chinese phonemes.Methods suggested to resolve the errors in initials include hand gestures,control of articulators and contrastive teaching,while methods for resolving the errors in finals include phonetic explanations,vowel additions,lining and belt method.As for tones,the thesis integrates relevant corpora from previous researches on the subject,and the teaching methods experimented by the author.The author considers musical method,Praat software assistive method and exaggeration method to be effective ways of solving problems in the learning Chinese tones.The thesis ends with concluding remarks from the author and summarizes the whole thesis in brief.