Study On The Mastering Of The Relationship Between Pronunciation And Meaning Of Polyphone Of Middle And High Level Chinese Learners

China is becoming increasingly influential in the world,as a result of which Chinese is becoming popular and more and more foreigners begin to learn Chinese.Relevant studies concerning Chinese-teaching and teaching-methodology are also drawing attention worldwide.However,Chinese is rendered more difficult because of the complex relationship within the form,pronunciation and meaning of characters,especially the phenomenon of polyphone characters,which is unavoidable when learning Chinese.It is also extremely important in Chinese acquisition.At present,there are many studies regarding polyphone characters in modern Chinese,most of which focus on polyphone characters themselves,rather than the polyphone characters in the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.My thesis aims to combine polyphone characters and Chinese teaching.The objects of my study are all long-term middle or advanced level Chinese learners form the Institute of Foreign Students,Nanjing University.The target words are selected from the New Outline of HSK Vocabulary and several teaching materials.Through questionnaire we hope to know how well they master polyphone characters;we also want to know the relevant factors that affect their mastering of polyphone characters,based on which the reasons of false pronunciation/interpretation will be revealed and reasonable suggestions will be proposed.This essay adopts questionnaire to study middle-and high-level Chinese learners' acquisition of polyphone.There are 2 types of questionnaires:one is for students and the other is for teachers.We received altogether 62 student-questionnaires and 25 teacher-questionnaires.The questionnaires for students aim to study students' acquisition from two perspectives:the pronunciation and meaning of polyphone.We use SPSS to analyze the reasons of false-pronunciation and misunderstanding of polyphone from 3 perspectives:the lexical level of polyphone,the difference of pronunciation and relevance of meanings.We also conduct a comparative analysis between middle-and high-level Chinese learners and among learners from various backgrounds.In contrast,the questionnaires for teachers emphasize teachers' views and teaching methods on polyphone.The 25 teachers we study are all from the Institute for International Students,Nanjing University,who have many years of Chinese-teaching experience.Through questionnaire investigation and statistical analysis,I draw some conclutions.First,the phenomenon of false pronunciation/interpretation of polyphone characters is quite common in middle or advanced-level Chinese learners.However,they are better at mastering the meaning of polyphone characters than the pronunciation.Second,the following factors mainly influence how well foreign Chinese learners master polyphone characters:use frequency,pronunciation differences and their Chinese level.Polyphone characters with high use frequency,huge difference in each pronunciation are easier for students to study,especially for the students with advanced language proficiency,while the relevance in various meanings of polyphone characters does not affect their acquisition of these characters.Third,students from different cultural backgrounds master polyphone characters differently.Those whose cultural backgrounds are related to Chinese tend to master polyphone characters better,whereas their counterparts are more capable of mastering the combination of meaning and pronunciation of polyphone characters.At last,we find that the following reasons are responsible for the false pronunciation/interpretation of polyphone characters:Chinese characters do not represent the pronunciation;their pronunciation is influenced by those pronunciation frequently used,etc.Based on these reasons,we propose 3 suggestions from 3 perspectives,namely the compilation of textbooks,teacher and their teaching style,students and their study strategy respectively.Teachers and students should both keep in mind of the combination of pronunciation and meaning of polyphone characters and construct a network of the combination.Teachers should pay more attention to the categorization of polyphone characters and students remember polyphone characters in accordance with their specific characteristics.