Case Study Of Tone Acquisition By American Primary-Chinese Learners

Though researches regarding American students’tone acquisition have been carried out by many scholars, the combination of comparing the tone acquisition of both reading passages and speaking freely with chronologically analyzing the pronunciation variation and trend, is still of great research potential. This is why the author wanted to carry out this follow-up phonetic research, the subjects of which were four American students who came to China to study Chinese for around half a year.The first part is the introduction, which summarizes the research potential of this topic, the reasons for picking this topic, the objective and meaning of this research. This part also concisely and thoroughly explains the research design and data processing and analyzing method. This research picks four American students at primary Chinese level as subjects. The recording of their passage reading and free conversation lasts for four month. To make sure that the difficult levels of the reading materials are consistent, the author picked7out of15recordings to carry out analysis. In terms of data processing, the author uses Excel to calculate the error rates, and uses Praat to analyze the recording.The second part provides theoretical bases and a summary of previous researches. In terms of theoretical bases, transfer theory, interlanguage system, and phonetic variation theory have been frequently used to explain problems in second language acquisition."Fossilization" is a term in interlanguage theory to describe the phenomena in which learners’performance stagnate. Phonetic variation theory is a relative new theory in this area. Currently, researches have mainly focused on how the situational context influences one’s phonetic performance. Since this paper provides both performance in passage reading and oral conversation, it can dive into the analysis of the impact of context on phonetic performance. The third part compares the error rate and the phonetic description under the two contexts, providing a general analysis of phonetic performances, and analyzing each subject’s performance on a microscopic level. For each subject, the author picks out two tones to do an in-depth description. Generally, phonetic performances in passage reading and free speaking context are correlated-for each subject, the tones that they grasp well when read passages tend to stay well when speak freely. And the average error rates of speaking freely are relatively higher than that of passage reading, which can be attributed to a decline of "self-control". In terms of tone sphere, both in passage reading and casual conversation part, T2is the most difficult and T1is generally well grasped.The forth part elaborates on the variation and trend of each subject’s tone performance through out the entire four months’ recording period, offering a chronological analysis on the whole and to the specific. The author finds out that the phonetic performance didn’t experience a clear variation or developmental path, but there’re some quite distinctive trends. T2remains to be the most difficult for all the four subjects. And there’s also possibly "fossilization" happening.The fifth part illustrates the reasons behind tone errors, such as negative transfer from native language. This part also provides some pedagogical suggestions from perspectives of teaching sequence, procedures and methods relating to the findings of this research.The last part is the conclusion and reflection. In terms of the questions unanswered and the new interesting phenomena, the author proposes some future research potential topics and directions. For instance, expand the samples and increase the recording frequency and length, so as to acquire a more convincing data. Also, compare students of introductory, intermediate and advanced level to see if there’s a dynamic trend.