Research On Thai Middle-school Students' Attainment Of Mandarin Mono-syllabic Tones

This thesis inspected Thai middle-school students' attainment of mandarin mono-syllabic tones, explained the possible reasons of causing this attainment,and put forward some pertinent suggestions to tone teaching according to the errors existing in the Thai students' mandarin mono-syllabic tones.There are two experiments in the thesis.In experiment 1,we used the Task of auditory presentation to study Thai students' auditory perception of mandarin mono-syllabic tones;in experiment 2,we selected randomly two students from the studied class and one Chinese student who can speak standard mandarin,recorded their pronunciation of the same material with the experimentl,and then analyzed their pronunciation sample by the Praat speech sound software so as to research their output quality of mandarin mono-syllabic tones.It was found that the attainment of the second tone is the worst of four tones,and with the delayed turning point of its pitch curve,its pitch model is close to the third tone,while there are errors in the pitch value;the attainment of third tone is the worse one,the turning point of its pitch curse is delayed,while there are errors in the pitch value and duration;the delayed turning point may be a distinguished characteristic between the second tone and the third tone; comparing with the second and the third tone,the attainment of the forth tone is good,but duration is too long;the attainment of the first tone also good,but the pitch value may go down slightly.In a word,confusion with the second tone and the third tone is the most serious of all the errors.On the base of the analysis of the research result,we had obtained the primary understanding about Thai students' attainment of mandarin tones,and then discussed the possible reasons from the perspectives of transfer of mother tongue and learning environment.At last,the author put forward the teaching strategy of teaching the first half of the third tone firstly,and some teaching suggestions,such as extending the period of learning phonology,strengthening the drills of auditory distinguishing and teaching of knowledge of Chinese tones.