Research On The Acquisition Of Tone 4 In Mandarin By American Learners At The Primary Level

Tone teaching is a major difficulty in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language.There exists different difficulties in learning Chinese tones for Chinese learners from different countries.In addition,phonics learning is a long process,if Chinese learners do not master the tone in early stage,it is easy to appear tone rigidity in the later stage.Based on the above considerations,The study investigates acquisition of tone 4 by American students at the primary level,phonetic experiments and statistical analysis are the main methods,so that we could systematically sort out the acoustic performance of the fourth tone acquisition and the distribution of tonal shape and tonal range errors in different contexts.The results of phonetic experiments showed that the difficulty of producing four tones when American students read monosyllable words is:T4>T1>T2>T3.When reading disyllable words,the tonal range problems are low starting point,high end point and small span.The tonal shape problems have three aspects:one is the fourth tone has three kinds of tonal shape errors,that is flating,ascending and melody.Then,the four matched tones keep their own tone,the students don’t acquist the modified tone.Last,the shape of second tone and third tone are quite similar,which will cause misusing these two tones among the students.The statistical results showed that there exists the effect of situational context and linguistic context on American students’ production of fourth tone.In situational context,flating and ascending tone are two variants of tone 4 when American students read monosyllable words.When reading disyllable words,the two variants mainly exist in the tone combination of X+T4,the tone combination of T4+X mainly presents tonal range error.What’s more,a new variant appears.In linguistic context,American students were progressively more accurate in T4+X than in X+T4.In addition,in the X+T4,the order of the fourth tone’s pronunciation from good to bad is:T1>T3>T2>T4.In T4+X,the order of the fourth tone’s pronunciation from good to bad is:T4>T1>T3>T2.