Difficulties Of Acquiring Mandarin Tone Of Indonesian Senior High School Students And The Teaching Strategies

When served as a mandarin teacher in a senior high school of Indonesia whose name is Trimulia, the author of the thesis noticed that Indonesian senior high school students are eager to learn mandarin. Learning mandarin means a lot to them, but it's difficult at the same time, especially in the phonetic aspect. And perhaps, the problem about mandarin tune is the most outstanding one of them. So, for the sake of intending to solve this problem, the author did some study with the support of some related theoretic knowledge, such as phonetics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, second language acquisition, etc.Firstly, we did a tone identification experiment with a questionnaire consisting of 60 syllables randomly arranged and all senior high school students of Trimulia as the subjects. The result of the experiment showed that the students acquired tone 3 and tone 4 firstly in perception, and then tone 1, tone 2 is the most difficult to acquire for them.We believe the tone acquisition order is related to the phonetic characteristics of mandarin tone and the traits of human cognitive learning. And teaching mandarin tone should obey these characteristics and traits. So, we proposed to change the order when we teach mandarin tone. In other words, we can teach tone 1 firstly, secondly tone 3, then tone 4, tone 2 is the last to teach. Actually, we took the proposal in the latter teaching experiment. And the result of it indicated that the proposal was work. It really made the subjects did a better job in tone acquisition.Finally, on the bases of the results of the two experiments and the related theoretic knowledge, we summed up several strategies which can be used in mandarin tone teaching: (1) Adjusting the tone order when teaching; (2) "input" more than and before "output"; (3) Teaching one category tone one time. (4) Taking tone category more important than the pitch levels scale; (5) Taking advantages of some remembering strategies; (6) putting more attention on the psychological factors of the students.