Intermediate Stage Of Thai Students Learning Chinese Tone Study

Traditional phonetic research is mainly based on the teaching experience of the teacher and is processed through the method of hearing identification test.The development of experimental phonetics has brought precise scientific data to the phonetic research.The following article focuses on the research of the mistakes Thai students have made when they are learning the tone of Mandarin.The phonetic analysis upon Thai students includes the analysis of monosyllable word and bisyllable word of some Year 3 Thai students from Southwest University, and is based on experimental phonetics, contrastive linguistics and the theory of error analysis. The introduction talks about the basis of the article, object of the research and research methods. Eleven Thai students whose Mandarin is of middle level took the phonetic tests.The Praat software is used to do the phonetic analasys and the voice samples of Thai students are compared with those of Chinese students.The first chapter states the basic concept of tone and the phonetic research towards Thai language. Terms referring phonetics are also explained in this chapter.Then follows the conclusion of the research on teaching Chinese as an second language, and research on the phonetic aspect of Thai and Chinese language. In the field of teaching Chinese as an second language, experimental phonetics contributes a lot though it's not been used for a long time.At the same time, more and more overseas Thai students provide a large number of experimental sources to studying Thai and Chinese language. In recent years more and more researches are focus on Thai students.Still there is not so much research on the phonetic aspect of Thai students whose Chinese are in the middle level.The second chapter analyze the phonetic characteristics of Thai students when they pronounce a monosyllable word with phonetic analysis softwares.When pronouncing a monosyllable word, Thai students can correctly pronouce but the range is smaller than those of Chinese students.Also, the Thai students whose Chinese are of middle level can manage to handle and correct their pronouciation.In chapter three, the software will analyze the bisyllable word pronouciation of Thai students in sixteen combination with the analysis software. It shows the phonetic graph and baseband of Thai students' bisyllable word pronounciation. Compared with those of Chinese students, though Thai students are doing fine in monosyllable word, their pronouciation are unstable on bisyllable word. In chapter four, acoording to the problems of Thai students on their Mandarin learning, some teaching opinions and advice are given as below:First, do exercises on raising tone pitch and widening tone pitch range.Second, use available phonetic software and musical phonetic teaching method, let students understand tones through direct sense.Third, the focal point of teaching the frist tone is to steady the tone of students and raise their tone pitch.The focal point of teaching the second tone is to enlarge the tone pitch range of the students and raise the tone pitch of the end value. The focal point of teaching the third tone is to know about where is the infection point; as for teaching the forth tone Fourth is to teach the tone in a certain order.Fifth is to generalize the leading principle and requirements of the phonetic teaching on teaching Chinese as an second language. Last, to combine various teaching methods and form a full-scale teaching model.