An Investigation And Case Study On Teaching Chinese Phonetics At Primary Level In East Africa

Phonics is the physical shell of language.The effectiveness of phonological learning directly affects the effectiveness of language learning.The author has taught mandarin in Rwanda and Eritrea which lie in East Africa for five years.When she worked here she found that Rwandan and Eritrean learners had language errors in pronouncing Chinese vowels and consonants.From the perspectives of both teaching and learning,the author surveyed Chinese government sponsored teachers and volunteer teachers separately.From teachers’ perspective,the author investigate Rwanda learner who had language errors in pronouncing Chinese vowels,consonants and Pinyin with letter “ü”.From learners’ perspective,the author surveyed Rwanda learners who had difficulties in pronouncing Chinese vowels,consonants and why these vowels and consonants are difficult for them,when they study Chinese Pinyin at the beginning.The survey shows that Rwandan students learning Chinese Pinyin for the first time,The deviation rates of Chinese consonant from high to low are r,ch,zh,sh>n,l,t,d>g,k,h,x>z,c,s,j,q,y,w,f.when students learn Chinese consonants,the order of difficulty is r,zh,ch,sh>j,q,x>c,z,s>n,l,d,t.As for learning Chinese vowels,For single vowels,the most difficult parts for learners are ü,er,and e.for compound vowels,the most difficult part is üe.For Chinese vowels with nasal consonant part,the most difficult part are üan,ün,ang,iang,uang,eng,ing,and ueng.At the same time,when j,q,x,y,n,l combine with vowels with letter “ ü”,Rwandan learners always have the most language errors in pronunciation.through unstructured interviews to Chinese language teachers,the author learned that teachers who teach Chinese in Rwanda often use band-reading method,the demonstration method,the pronunciation instruction method and the method of pronouncing a vowel or a consonant turgidly to improve students’ pronunciation while these methods are relatively ineffective.Because of this situation,the author used the Chinese vowel that can combines with certain consonants or the consonant combines with certain vowels,which is named vocal-phonetic spelling method to correct students’ pronunciation of a single vowel and single consonant and concentrate on practicing the vowel and the consonant with a high rate of deviation.In teaching practice,this method has been found to be extremely effective in improving students’ phonetic pronunciation and their mastery of the rules of the target language.In a word,in addition to the traditional phonetic correction method,the phonetic spelling method is also extremely effective in correcting phonological errors when students are first learning Chinese phonetics.focusing on practicing students’ phonetic errors,keeping their interests of Chinese language class,helping them to correct their pronunciation will increase their confidence and decrease their anxiety of Chinese language learning.