Study On The Tone Acquisition Of Peruvian Chinese Elementary Level Students

For Chinese students in Peru,a Spanish-speaking country,the pronunciation of Mandarin tones is a common phenomenon.In order to find out the reasons for the students’ Chinese tone errors,this article uses different methods to study the main problems of the Confucius Institute learners’ Chinese tones acquisition.This article contains three important purposes: The first is to collect data on the tone acquisition of basic-level students at the Confucius Institute in Arequipa,in order to understand the overall situation of the students and to score them.The second is to use appropriate scientific methods to analyze the results of the acquisition,to find the more difficult tones of Mandarin,and to make teaching suggestions.The third is to find out the reasons for the influence of the students’ Chinese tones errors.In order to analyze the students’ Chinese tones acquisition,we used the research methods of field investigation and phonetic software analysis.First,a questionnaire was sent to students of the Confucius Institute at Arequipa’s basic Chinese proficiency,and they were asked to record their own pronunciation in tones.After obtaining the audio,use the 13.0.5 version of Wonder Share Uni Converter program to change the audio format to WAV format,and then use the 5.2.27 version of the Praat program for tone analysis.In addition to analyzing the pitch of the voice tones,the duration of the tones is also analyzed to determine which tones are the most difficult for students to learn,and the specific errors in pronunciation.The results of the analysis show that the most difficult tone to grasp is the second tone,followed by the third tone.Obviously,the students don’t have much difficulty in mastering the first tone and the fourth tone.Among these 13 students,two students were unable to master the basic pronunciation skills of correct tones.They could not even pronounce the fourth tone and the first tone correctly.These problems maybe is related to the environment,because students only attend classes from Monday to Thursday,and there are only 8 hours in total per week.What’s worse now is that because students interact with teachers online and lack effective communication in face-to-face teaching,so students are easy to lose interest in learning and cannot improve the pronunciation level of Chinese tones.Only taking Chinese lessons a few times a week is not enough to alleviate the influence from frequent speaking of Spanish,and the study of Chinese is easy to be put aside.Another important reason is that most of the teachers in the Confucius Institute are volunteers.They only teach Chinese in the destination country for a short period of time.Although the pronunciation of the tones of the Chinese teacher is correct,due to language differences and not all students understand English,the students do not understand the teacher’s explanation of the tones of Chinese.The teacher mastered the theory of Chinese tones,but due to limited knowledge of Spanish,it was unable to influence the students,resulting in their failure to explain in detail the correct pronunciation of Chinese tones.