Contrastive Research On The Development Of Chinese Phonological Awareness For Overseas Students With Tonal Against Non-tonal Mother Tongue Background

Based on two tests,we studied the synchronic development of Chinese phonological awareness of foreign students who are primary Chinese learners.In this paper,some foreign students' mother tongue is tonal language—Thai language and others' are non-tonal languages. In Experiment 1,the development of Chinese phonological awareness of the foreign students was tested by means of auditory presentation.Results show that all of the students firstly develop the tone awareness,then the awareness of syllable-initial consonant and syllable-final vowel and consonant.However,due to different mother tongue systems,the syllable-initial consonant awareness and tone awareness of Thai students are better than those of other foreign students.In Experiment 2,we tested the same foreign students' development of Chinese phonological awareness through the way of visual presentation.Results show that the development of tone awareness lags behind.However,as a result of the mother tongue system,tone awareness of Thai students is still better than that of other foreign students.The two experiments show that different mother tongues,different types of phonological awareness and different ways that were adopted during the experiments all have an influence on foreign students' development of Chinese phonological awareness.We also made a comparative analysis on the acquisition of Chinese tone of Thai students and other students because we compared the two groups foreign students according to whether their mother tongues have tones or not.We hope this study will enrich the understanding of the development of Chinese phonological awareness of foreign students, especially Thai students,and sequentially improve the effectiveness and pertinence of speech sounds teaching from the view of second language teaching.