Analysis Of Errors In Chinese Pronunciation Of Luganda Speaking Students And Suggested Teaching Strategies

With China being on the forefront of globalization, Chinese as a second languageis becoming increasingly popular with students worldwide. Pronunciation is at the verycore of Chinese. Hence, pronunciation needs to be a priority during the process oflearning Chinese to achieve the best results for language students. An integral elementof this focus on pronunciation is the application of error analyses during the teachingprocess. Research has indicated that the phonetic errors made by foreign studentslearning Chinese show certain characteristics of the students’ linguistic nativity. Theresearch has implied that it would be more meaningful to relate with the students’phonetic errors relatively. Most of the research that has been conducted so far on thelinguistic comparison of teaching Chinese as a foreign language and other languagesfocuses on comparing Chinese and English or Asian languages, including Japanese,Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. In contrast, comparisons between Chinese and Africanlanguages are very limited despite constantly intensifying relationships between Chinaand the African countries, the large and steadily growing number of African studentslearning Chinese and the opening of several Confucius Institutes around the Africancontinent. This thesis addresses the aforementioned shortage in linguistic research bycomparing Chinese and Luganda, the most widely spoken local language in Uganda.This paper tries to analyze the pronunciation errors of Luganda speaking studentswhile learning Chinese as a second language and carries out the analysis from theaspects of initials, vowels and tones.The first chapter lists the errors that occur from theabove mentioned aspects and gives a detailed description of these errors. The secondchapter gives a detailed analysis of the causes of the errors based on the effects of thethree phonetic systems of Luganda, Chinese and English, the objective environmentand factors directly related to the students, like character and interests. The thirdchapter proposes some teaching strategies suitable for correcting these errors made byLuganda speaking students in the process of learning Chinese phonetics. The fourthchapter is the conclusion and it summarizes the entire thesis, pointing out some of thelimitations of and expectations from this study.