Experimental Study Of The Third Tone Of Ghanaian Students

There is not a falling-raising tone which likes the third tone of Chinese in Akan language,the most widely used national language in Ghana,and English,the official language learned and used by Ghanaian since childhood.There are,in addition,complex rules of the Tone Sandhi in the third tone of Chinese.Thus,the third tone is always the important and difficult points in the Chinese learning of Ghanaian students.Based on the problem of Chinese tones which founded in the teaching process and on the basis of the previous studies,this paper first investigates the listening and identification ability of Ghanaian students in Chinese monosyllabic and disyllabic groups of the third tone through the listening test;then,through praat using acoustic experiment to analyze the students’ pronunciation in Chinese monosyllabic and disyllabic groups of the third tone from the tone pitch and tone shape,and summarizing the pronunciation error rules.The result of the listening test shows that Ghanaian students can master the first tone and the fourth tone well in single-syllable word.But the students usually misidentified the second tone to the third tone.In the test of double-syllable words part,Ghanaian students often confused the second tone with the third tone in both positions of the front and the back.The mainly performance is that the students misidentified the second tone to the third tone,or misidentified the third tone to the second tone.This kind of error is especially serious when the latter tone is the second tone.The result of the acoustic experiment shows that in the single word part Ghanaian students are not good at the second tone.They often mispronounced the second tone’s mid-raising to the third tone’s falling-raising.The left three tones’ pronunciations were basically correct in tone pattern,but there existed some deviations and mistakes in tone pitch.In the experiment of double-syllable words part,students often mistook the third tone which is in the front position to the second tone’s raising type.When the third tone is in the latter position,students often made it as a raising slightly tone or the end of the tone is high.When two third tone syllables are read in sequence,the first one turns into the second tone.However,the students often made the mistakes of the low pitch at the start of the tone or at the end of the tone.As Ghanaian students were liable to confuse the second tone and the third tone in their Chinese learning,this paper analyzed the causes of the errors from the influence of Ghanaian students’ first language,the complexity of Chinese,the influence of teaching environment and teaching conditions.Thus,the author made several suggestions from two perspectives of teachers and Center for Language Education and Cooperation.Combined with the above analysis results and teaching practice,this paper designed a plan of strengthen tone training,which focuses on the difference between the second tone and the third tone,especially of their inflection points’ differences.The effect of the plan is obvious after test.There are 42 figures,119 tables and 64 references in the following paper.