| Neutral tone, which is frequently used in oral Chinese, is a special modification phenomenon in Chinese speech. However, comparing to neutral tone, neutral tone word is a kind of linguistic phenomenon and closely related to vocabulary and grammar. Whether foreign students can recognize and speak neutral tone naturally brings great difficulties into their Chinese study, and is also one of the key points for teachers in Chinese teaching process. Foreign students’ ability of using neutral tone is an important criterion to evaluating the levels of their Chinese language. But unfortunately, neutral tone teaching has not drawn enough attentions in the process of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language yet.In terms of the current situation, not only the contemporary Chinese linguistics researchers, but also all scholars who are dedicated in TCSL field should pay attention to neutral tone words teaching process, penetrate into the investigation and formulate the suitable strategies. Despite the fact that the study related to neutral tone and neutral tone words is very comprehensive in Chinese linguistics field, however, a huge lag corresponding to neutral tone words teaching methods can be found in the field of applied Chinese linguistics, TCSL precisely speaking. Under such circumstances, TCSL teachers should lay emphasis on drawing lessons from the achievements in Chinese linguistics fields. This thesis attempts to achieve innovative theoretical and practical values in neutral tone words teaching process by widely using TCSL teaching materials.Teaching materials, supporters of TCSL teaching process, can reflect certain problems of neutral tone words teaching methods in the class.Two different integrated textbooks, New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook and Boya Chinese are chosen to thoroughly investigate the using of neutral tone words in this thesis.The thesis can be divided into6chapters. At the very beginning, the thesis identifies the definition and classification of neutral tone words, and then summaries the current situation of neutral tone words in Chinese linguistics and applied Chinese linguistics fields. In the following two chapters, the thesis, comparing the textbooks with Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency and New HSK Syllabus, illustrates the distribution and phonetic annotation of the neutral tone words.And the results show that the textbooks need great efforts in improving phonetic annotation. In the fourth and fifth chapters, it investigates and analyzes the explanation and exercises of neutral tone words teaching process, finding that the students can only receive limited information from the unclear explanations and monotonous exercises. In order to acquire more information, some intermediate and high Chinese level foreign students were invited into a questionnaire, related to the topic of neutral tone words learning, and more than60students responded. The designed questionnaire can be divided into two parts:record foreign students’attitude towards neutral tone words learning process from several questions, and evaluate students’ knowledge about neutral tone words from an in-class test. As we expected, the feedbacks of the questionnaire reflect that foreign students in the two levels do not pay enough attention to the neutral tone words, as a result, only few students are able to receive80out of100from the tests right. According to those evidence mentioned in the previous chapters, a conclusion can be drawn that the textbooks and teachers should clarify the importance of neutral tone words learning to the students, and make it clear that acquire the knowledge of neutral tone words is the essential part in their ways of learning Chinese. Several suggestions have been written in the thesis from two different angles:phonetics and lexicology.And hope they could provide certain values in the aspect of neutral tone words teaching process. |
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