The Negative Influence Of French Intonations On The Accuracy Of Chinese Tones For Students From Qu(?)bec,Canada

As the number of students learning Chinese both abroad and in China continues its rapid increase,the amount of research focused on Chinese education continues to increase as well.Along with this increase in research follows a diversification of teaching methods,based on the specific goals and needs of students,especially when considering the various origins of these students.Tonal education,the teaching of tones and particularly the assessment of students' ability to reproduce these tones,is one of the most important aspects of Chinese education,it is also considered by many students to be the hardest.Besides proper learning of Chinese tones,the understanding of one's mother tongue's influence on the acquisition of a new language,in this case Mandarin Chinese,is also very important.This thesis focuses on the influence of French intonations on the accuracy of Chinese tones for students from the province of Quebec,Canada.As French intonations,which can be identified as a combination of pauses,accents,and changes in pitch,are different from those of Chinese,it is imperative that native French speakers learn how to separate one from another,that is stopping themselves from using French intonations which directly disrupt the accuracy of Chinese tones.The first section of this thesis is comprised of a general overview of the background,objective as well as significance of this research.The second section introduces the theoretical basis upon which this thesis is written,as well as previous studies regarding Mandarin tones,Mandarin intonations,the influence of one's mother language intonations on Mandarin tones,French intonations as well as Mandarin tonal education.The third section expands on the design of this research,the methods of data acquiring,as well as the general principles for group level splitting of the research subjects.This research focuses on four graduate students of intermediate and advanced level originating from the province of Quebec,Canada.Using audio recording as well as Pratt,a speech analysis software,an analysis of the four subjects' grasp on Mandarin tones as well as a comparison with four native speakers was performed.The results of the analysis were carefully analyzed and used to split the four subjects into two groups:Intermediate level and Advanced level.Through this section,we mainly discovered that even students belonging to intermediate and advanced levels of Chinese lacked some basic understandings of Chinese tones,mainly regarding tone combinations and tone sandhi.The core elements of this research are found in the fourth section.The four students recorded five different sentences,belonging to five different sentence types(Declarative sentence,Interrogative sentence,Rhetorical question,Imperative sentence and Exclamatory Sentence)in both French and Chinese.Using Pratt,every pair of French and Chinese sentences were analyzed to identify the relationship between the students' native language intonations and the mistakes that occurred regarding Chinese tones.The main findings of this section are that French intonations,mainly accents and sentence intonations,have a clear influence on the accuracy of Chinese tones.The fifth section of this research features the new elements this thesis hopes to bring to this field.Through a thorough analysis of the four Quebec students' results,this research identifies the specific influence that French intonations have over the accuracy of Mandarin tones for Quebec students.From these results,specific teaching suggestions are given to accurately target the errors that result from the relationship between intonations and tones.These suggestions mainly relate to basic tonal education,intonation practice,imitation exercises as well as the use of voice analysis software.After this,we summarized the results of this research,identified some deficiencies and provided suggestions for future research topics and directions,such as a higher number of research subjects,more content for analysis and additional steps to test the above-mentioned teaching suggestions.Based on the analysis of the research subject's recordings,this thesis concludes that French intonations have a direct influence on the accuracy of students who have yet to separate the concepts of French intonations,specifically accents and general changes in pitch,and Chinese tones and intonations.To prevent these problems,the author proposes a series of teaching and study techniques based around proper acquisition of tones and their combinations,proper tonal education(which includes both Chinese tones and intonations),imitation practice skills as well as the use of voice analysis software.