Research On European And American Students’ Acquisition Of Chinese Tones And Learning Strategies

This study takes 30 European and American students who study in International Chinese Education Center,School of Humanities,Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an example.In order to know their existing level of Chinese and Chinese pronunciation learning strategies,the methods of doing survey and pronunciation assessment are used in this study.After completing data collection,questionnaires are analyzed through the phonetic analysis software Praat,the statistical software SPSS 24.0 and Excel.The specific data analysis methods include descriptive analysis,independent-samples T test and correlation analysis.The results of this study show that cognitive strategies and emotion strategies are most commonly used by European and American students followed by social strategies and memory strategies;the least commonly used strategies are metacognitive strategies.Through the comparison of students who gained high score and low score in Chinese pronunciation assessment,the students who gained high score are good at using cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies and less use emotion strategies and memory strategies;the students who gained low score are more likely to use cognitive strategies and memory strategies and less use emotion strategies and metacognitive strategies.After the comparison of European and American students’ scores in Chinese pronunciation assessment and the correlation analysis of learning strategies,we found that there is significant correlation between metacognitive strategy,emotion strategies and pronunciation results;there are 5 specific learning strategies significantly correlated with Chinese tones scores.According to the research conclusion,we put forward some suggestions for teachers who will teach European and American students Chinese pronunciation.