Empirical Research On The Development Of Chinese Phonological Awareness Of Intermediate Chinese Learners Of Indo-European Native Speakers

On the basis of the previous study and knowledge of phonetics, this paper mainly discuss the Chinese phonological awareness development of intermediate Chinese learners of Indo-European native speakers. We attempt to answer the following questions:(1) What’s the development model of Chinese phonological awareness of Indo-European native speakers who are intermediate Chinese learners?(2)What’s the main factor that influences the development of Chinese phonological awareness of the participants?(3) Can the phonetic teaching promote the development of Chinese phonological awareness?In the first part, we elaborate the research background, including the definition of phonological awareness, the measurement of phonological and the relevant research on phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a linguistic concept which related to psychology. We hold to the opinion that phonological awareness belongs to metalinguistic awareness and includes different kinds of awareness of speech units. In this paper, we agree that the tone awareness should be emphasized in Chinese phonological awareness. We designed 4 items- syllable awareness、syllable-initial consonant awareness、syllable-final vowel awareness and tone awareness-to explore the development of Chinese phonological awareness of intermediate Chinese learners of Indo-European native speakers.With the promotion of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, we need to work hard to enrich the achievements in this field.Next, on the basis of two experiments, we studied the synchronic development of Chinese phonological awareness of foreign students of Institute for International Students Nanjing University who are intermediate Chinese learners by a quantitative method. These foreign students’ mother tongues belong to the Indo-European Family.In experiment 1, we tested the development of Chinese phonological awareness of the 34 foreign students by means of auditory presentation. Results show that the subjects develop the syllable-initial consonant awareness and syllable awareness firstly, then the syllable-final vowel awareness, tone awareness is the latest. This development mode is totally different from that of Chinese children.In experiment 2, the development of Chinese phonological awareness of the 34 foreign students was tested by the way of visual presentation. Results show that the development of tone awareness lags behind other types of phonological awareness. The Chinese phonological awareness development mode is similar to that of experiment 1. We speculate that the difference between experimental materials has little or no influence on the development order of Indo-European native speakers.The two experiments reveal that mother tongue difference, the length of Chinese learning and teaching factors will all influence foreign students’ development of Chinese phonological awareness, especially the mother tongue difference and teaching factors.We also found our conclusion is different from the former because of the difference of participant and test material. In the paper, we verified the topic ——"Chinese phonological awareness can be improved by training".Since the traditional research has become more developed in this field, we should take full advantage of other disciplines to deepen our study on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Our study is trying to do a tentative exploration in interdisciplinary studies of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, however, we only draw a fundamental conclusion due to the limitation of conditions. We look forward to improving these shortages in future studies.We hope that the study will deepen our understanding of Chinese phonological development of foreign students and sequentially improve the pertinence of phonetic teaching. Furthermore, we hope that our experiment can enrich the research of Chinese phonological awareness development of Indo-European native speakers and sequentially lead the professional development of Chinese phonetic teaching.