The Empirical Study On The Acquisition And Corrective Feedback Of Chinese Plosives And Affricates For Learners With Russian Background

Phonetics teaching is the basic part of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.As one distinct feature of Chinese pronunciation,aspirated and unaspirated consonants are difficult for most international Chinese language learners.To address the related phonetic errors,it is necessary for teachers to give corrective feedback,so that the learners can improve their accuracy.Recently,the development of the “Belt and Road Initiative” has witnessed the increase of Chinese language learners with Russian background in China.Those learners have made common errors in the acquisition of Chinese initial consonants,especially plosives and affricates.Therefore,it is of great significance for scholars in international Chinese education to analyze the characteristics and causes of those phonetics errors and put forward teaching suggestions.Therefore,this paper takes Chinese plosives and affricates as the research object,and investigates the consonant pronunciation of intermediate and advanced Chinese language learners with Russian background by means of experimental phonetics.Firstly,by comparing the pronunciation data of Chinese plosives and affricates between Chinese language learners with Russian background and Chinese students,it is found out that the former is not sensitive to the distinction between aspirated and unaspirated sounds in plosives and affricates.By comparing Chinese and Russian consonant systems and conducting interviews with learners,it is discovered that their pronunciation errors mainly result from the negative transfer of Russian,a poor awareness of phonological patterns and the low frequency of Chinses use.Secondly,the learners are divided into prompt group and restatement group based on a background check and each group is given weekly error-correction teaching for two weeks.The corrective feedback course is based on Lyster’s corresponding theory,explains phonetic knowledge with the help of Praat diagram,and adopts various practice methods with a consideration of the causes of learners’ errors in order to improve the pronunciation of plosives and affricates.Finally,through the acoustic post-test experiment,the thesis compares the pronunciation of the two groups before and after corrective feedback to test the effect of the teaching and discuss the effectiveness of prompt and restatement.The experimental results show that the learners have made obvious progress after corrective feedback: the difference between aspirated sound and unaspirated sound has increased,and the pronunciation is becoming more fluent and accurate.Moreover,the restatement group improves more on monosyllabic morpheme,and the prompt group performs better in the post-word of disyllabic morphemes.Based on the above study,the paper puts forward the following teaching suggestions for phonetics teaching of Russian background learners.First,it is important to clarify the differences between Chinese and Russian plosives and affricates.Second,the teachers are expected to elaborate on the minute distinctions between aspirated sound and unaspirated sound.Third,it is desirable to use Praat software to help students correct pronunciation errors.Fourth,it is strongly suggested to deepen the memory of single syllables by restatement,and improve the pronunciation standard of disyllables with the help of prompts.In this way,the thesis proves that acoustic experiments and corrective feedback teaching are beneficial to reduce the phonetics errors of Russian background learners,and can effectively help them improve their pronunciation.