A Study Of American Middle School Students On The Acquisition Of Chinese Phonetic System

Language is the most important tool for communication.As more and more foreign students and foreigners study Chinese,it is a great challenge to master the correct phonic system in Chinese pronunciation.Even there is more attention has been put for the phonics teaching,there is not enough systematic research regarding this topic,so it is for those student groups with the multination and multi-culture background.The author is a Chinese language teacher in a private school,The Wardlaw-Hartridge School(Abbreviation as WH school),in the center of New Jersey.The students come from different surrounding townships and different ethnic groups.Their mother language is not English,they even don't speak English at home.Most of them have learned Spanish for years.It is interesting to know if they have any special challenge or needs when they study the Chinese phonic system.Is there any impact from the languages they are using or have learned?The author has designed a research plan to study how well the foreign students to learn the initial consonants of Chinese syllables.The research includes the recording of the pronunciation,questionnaire survey,natural observation and direct conversation.Based on the collected information,the author analyzed the data and identified the trend and specialty for the learning of initial consonants from these student groups with the bi-or multilingual background.The author wants to identify the most difficult parts of the consonant study,and general rules in the phonological acquisition.The author has the following assumptions:1)There are positive and negative transfers from their previous language phonetics experience.The positive transfer should be bigger than the negative transfer.2).The bilingual or multilingual should have the advantage than the only English speakers in learning Chinese phonetics.(3)With the continuous study program and right guidance from the teacher,middle school students can achieve a higher phonetic level.Based on the positive phonetics transfer principle,the existing language experience of the WH school students should have the advantages over other English-speaking students for them in learning the Chinese phonetics.They have the lower rate of phonetic transfer,fewer challenges,most of the mistakes come from the consonants like "z,c,s,j,q,x and r".There are common trends when such transfer happens.Based on the testing results,even there is no much difference between the transfer rate between the bilingual group and multilingual group.For the sixth graders,the bilingual group has a slight lower rate than that of the multilingual group.Among the studied groups,multilingual group shows slight higher negative transfer rate.But for the other 3 age groups,there are not much big different,the multilingual group rate is only a little bit lower than the bilingual group.The two groups show the great similarity for most of the phonetic,only very few the multi-language groups show the advantage.Due to time limitation,small school size and lack of advanced instrumentation for analysis,it is inevitable for the error.Even there is a comparison between different age group,but no group can be followed for the consecutive years due to the time limitation.The research results are only for reference.The research is treated as Chinese as the second language.The truth is Chinese is set up as the third language in WH school.There is no much research on the situation when multiple languages are taught at the same time.This research is precedent to study phonetics for students who speak multiple languages.The author hopes this research and discovery will provide a good reference for other Chinese language teachers in the similar situation.