An Analysis Of How Asian Children Acquire Chinese Tones

This paper is research on Asian children's tone acquisition. For this study one character and two character words were mainly used. The sample of 31 students was selected from Shanghai United International School.This experiment can be divided into three parts:1. Pronouncing one-character words;2. Pronouncing two-character words;3. Modeled reading.In the first part, statistics were collected by listening. From this students' error rate and error distribution was established. Praat phonetic software was then used to draw a tone graph of some of the sample students results. From this it was possible to find some rules and key points that relate to Asian children's tone acquisition in TCFL.This was followed by listening to all the students' pronunciation of two-character words. In this part, the first step of the procedure was the same as that used in the first part. From this the error rate of the four tones, when they are in different positions, was established. From the error rate of the 20 different tone combinations, it was possible to find out which tone combinations are more difficult to learn. In order to avoid the subjectivity of listening only, Praat phonetic software was used to draw a graph of some students' two-character tone pronunciation. Neutral and modified toned words were analyzed separately.In the third part, the original data was compared with the modeled reading data, in order to find out to what extend modeled reading supported or improved the students' pronunciation.Finally, based on the results of the experiment and children's cognitive psychology some teaching suggestions on how best to teach Asian children Chinese tones are put forward. In this way an attempt has been made to make some contribution to teaching Chinese as a foreign language.