Teaching Mandarin Tones to Adult English Speakers: Analysis of Difficulties with Suggested Remedies

Lin, William C.

doi:10.1177/003368828501600207

Cited by 19 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…That student did succeed finally. Lin (1985) agreed with Woo (1976) and believed that Chinese sentence can be written into musical staff (see figure 11). Lin replaced Chinese characters by Pinyin under the musical staff.…”

Section: Music Related Methodssupporting

confidence: 63%

“…Based on these findings, educators proposed pedagogical solutions. Lin (1985) believed that inaccuracy in determining, describing, and explaining Tone 3 causes the major difficulty in learning Chinese tones. Lin proposed that Tone 3 should be taught as mainly low dipping rather than low-dipping-rising, since T3 occurs more than half of the time in the connected speech as a low-dipping tone.…”

Section: Methods On Problematic Tones and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wong, Schwartz, and Jenkins (2005) found that native Chinese children perceived and produced T3 significantly worse than other tones, and their most common error was the confusion between T3 and T2. Lin (1985) Neal (2014) conducted corpus study with five students in his Year 10 class (aged 15-16).…”

Section: Error Distribution In Four Tones and Acquisition Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, most pedagogical research targeted college learners and adult learners (e.g. Hsieh, 1997;Lin, 1985;Miracle, 1989;Zhang, 2006). Very little research has touched on younger CFL leaners of English L1 (first language).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Method of Teaching English Speaking Learners to Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones

Shi¹

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Learning Mandarin Chinese tones is a big challenge for English speaking learners. The average tonal production accuracy is reported to be about 70 percent for intermediate-level learners and 40 percent for beginning-level Chinese learners. The Chinese tonal proficiency significantly influences the learners' communicative effectiveness, including listening and speaking, but research often overlooks tonal production. This study proposed and tested a novel method of teaching English-speaking learners to pronounce Mandarin Chinese tones. This teaching method includes a Chinese tones bookmark, and a 30-50 minutes in-class training module. The research undertook five cycles of Design-Based Research (DBR) implementations with 31 public school students, adult learners, and Chinese teachers. Two audio recordings, one pre-training and one post-training, were collected and compared through the paired samples ttests. Interviews, surveys, and class observations were adopted to determine the participants' attitudes toward the training and the teaching model. The results revealed that the designed teaching method was effective to improve the tonal production accuracy of English speaking K-12 children and adult learners. In addition, the results indicated that the participants' attitudes toward the designed method were positive. This study contributes to the current Chinese tonal teaching repertoire and presents a flexible, practical method for teachers to use when instructing students on Chinese tones. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father, Yingchun Shi, and my prior advisor, Dr. Patricia Obenauf. Although they were my inspiration to pursue my doctoral degree, they are unable to see my graduation. This is for them. Thank you to my academic adviser, Dr. Sam F. Stack, who guided me in this process and to my dissertation committee who kept me on track. I dedicate this dissertation to my husband, Patrick Yao, who survived my five-year study and research with taking much more family responsibilities and tolerating my unstable temper. For my mother, Zhuoxi Liu, who helped me in all things great and small, and made her way to attend my graduation ceremony from China. This dissertation is dedicated to my children, Allan, Ben, Caden, and Destiny, who managed themselves well throughout my Ph.D. study with less attention and support from their mother.

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Section: Music Related Methodssupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Methods On Problematic Tones and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Error Distribution In Four Tones and Acquisition Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Method of Teaching English Speaking Learners to Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones

Shi¹

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“…In addition to more conventional methods of tone instruction by using illustrations and gradually combining tones with sentence intonation and word stress, a number of alternative teaching methods like tone instruction through music or computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) have been proposed over the decades. Jin and Lang (2005) suggest 'emotionally-charged' phrases as a starting point for the instruction of tones and sentence melody, while Chao (1948), Woo (1976), and Lin (1985) demonstrate the movement of Chinese syllable tones according to musical intervals. The notation of whole sentences and dialogues within the established Western notation system of five horizontal lines and four spaces was proposed by De Francis (1963) but has not been widely used due to its impracticability.…”

Section: Reformulations Pronunciation Instruction In Cfl Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oral Corrective Feedback: Examining Teacher- Initiated Correction of CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) Learners’ Pronunciation Errors

Renner¹

2015

Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies

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This paper examines oral corrective feedback strategies in regard to pronunciation errors in a Chinese foreign language classroom. Traditional oral corrective feedback typologies (Lyster and Ranta 1997; Ellis and Sheen 2006; Sheen 2011) have been combined with Chinese pronunciation teaching methods and investigated in a case study conducted at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. Two sessions of first year Chinese language laboratory classes were observed and recorded. The qualitative data analysis was carried out in two stages. First, traditional oral corrective feedback typologies were applied to the collected material in order to find out which types of corrective feedback were used (deductive analysis). The results revealed that corrective feedback on pronunciation errors are mostly given in an explicit manner. Therefore, as a second step, a differentiated typology of explicit correction was developed (inductive analysis). The main findings of this study are that pronunciation errors in a Chinese foreign language classroom are corrected explicitly and treated with methods of 1) explication, 2) comparison, and 3) reduction. The explicitness of these methods is further enhanced by 1) paralinguistic cues (stress, speech rate modification), 2) visualisations (gestures) and 3) additional verbalisation.

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Learners’ and Teachers’ Beliefs About Learning Tones and Pinyin

Juan

Medwell

2017

Explorations Into Chinese as a Second Language

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This paper reports a study of the perceptions of English-speaking learners and teachers about the challenges and difficulties of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learning in England. The study involved a Likert-scale questionnaire and follow-up interviews with 37 university student learners, 443 school students and the 42 teachers of both groups. The questionnaires and interviews explored beliefs about language learning, about Chinese language learning and about language learning strategies. This paper focuses on the findings concerning the perceived challenges of speaking Chinese and of tones in learning Chinese. The findings of this study present a picture of teachers who are keen for their students to learn to speak and communicate in Chinese, and of students who are keen to take risks in speaking. However, in contrast to earlier findings about learners' views about learning Chinese, the learners in this study claimed to be very tone aware and reported that they found listening and understanding Chinese more difficult than production. This is explored in relation to the pupils' views about learning tones and pinyin and raises questions about the ways they address tones and pinyin learning in the context of their expressed aim of communicating and taking risks in speaking. The discussion raises issues about the possible effects of communicative teaching of languages in English schools. We ask whether an emphasis on communicative approaches may affect how learners address difficulties of the Chinese pronunciation system and the use of pinyin.

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Teaching Mandarin Tones to Adult English Speakers: Analysis of Difficulties with Suggested Remedies

Cited by 19 publications

References 2 publications

A Method of Teaching English Speaking Learners to Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones

A Method of Teaching English Speaking Learners to Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones

Oral Corrective Feedback: Examining Teacher- Initiated Correction of CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) Learners’ Pronunciation Errors

Learners’ and Teachers’ Beliefs About Learning Tones and Pinyin

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