Foreign Students' Tone Perception And Memory Research

Tones are a vital part of the pronunciation of every syllable in Mandarin. Perception and memory play a crucial role in a student's acquisition and mastery of this important part of Mandarin pronunciation. Because the majority of students who study Mandarin as a second language have a non-tonal mother language, tones are quite difficult for them to master. Unfortunately, tones are often only explicitly taught during the initial stages of Mandarin instruction. Have students truly mastered this skill by the time they reach the middle level of their instruction? This thesis seeks to better understand this situation by exploring the tonal perception and memory of second year Mandarin students at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China.The perception portion of this thesis is divided into two different parts:a test of second year students'tonal perception abilities and a survey about their attitudes towards Mandarin tones. The perception test was composed of twenty disyllabic words selected from the students'textbook which included every possible disyllabic tonal combination in Mandarin. The test was administered by the students'teacher and required the students to record the tones which they heard their teacher read. The teacher only read each word once. After the test, the students filled out a survey that asked them to predict their scores and report their attitudes towards Mandarin tones. They were asked to rate, on a scale of 1-7, their tonal perception ability, perceived difficulty of Mandarin tones and their perceived importance of tones in the Mandarin language.34 students who had been studying Mandarin for an average of 22 months had an average score of 29.03 out of 40 points (72.57%) tonal perception test. The standard deviation was 8.17 points and the mode was 33 out of 40 (85%).50% of the students received a score of 85% or better, and 20% of the students received a score higher than 90%. Based on this we conclude that second year students have a relatively decent grasp on tonal perception, however some students still lag far behind. The survey showed that there was a strong correlation (r=0.701) between the students' actual test scores and their post-test prediction of their scores. In other words, students who performed poorly tended to predict that they would have a lower score, while students who did well predicted they would have a higher score.82% of the 33 students who took the survey considered Mandarin tones to be difficult and 91% thought tones were important.73% of the students thought that 60% or less of their tones were spoken correctly. From these data we can conclude that students understand the importance of tones, however there is still room for improvement.The tonal memory study consisted of two identical tests administered one month apart. Both test had 19 students participate, however only 13 students took both tests. The tests consisted of 20 vocabulary items (45 Chinese characters) taken directly from a unit they had just finished studying. Each of the 20 vocabulary items consisted of the Chinese characters and the corresponding pinyin (Romanization system for Chinese characters), however the pinyin was did not include any tone markers. The students were required to write down the corresponding tones from memory. The average score for the first test was 28.63 out of 45 points (63.6%) with a standard deviation of 9.57 points. The average score for the second test was 28.90 points out of 45 points (64.2%) with a standard deviation of 8.46 points. The difference of the scores was not statistically significant. However, of the 13 students who took the test twice, all but one received a lower score on the second test.The tonal perception and tonal memory results show many middle level Mandarin students are still having trouble with Mandarin tones and have yet to fully master their perception and retention of new vocabulary items. The first and primary recommendation to middle level Chinese language instructors is to raise their students' level of awareness when it comes to the importance of Mandarin tones. Instructors should implement more tests to better gauge students' level. Once students with problems have been identified it will be easier to help them improve. If instructors or even the new HSK test would implement tonal memory or perception tests it might encourage many students to take the tones more seriously. Instructors could also:introduce the students to the physiological aspects of the Mandarin tones, introduces them to computer programs designed to aid in retention of information or even mnemonic devices which could be helpful if students are having trouble with a particular vocabulary items tones.