A Comparative Experimental Study On Third Tones Of Carey Baptist Grammar School

As an integral part of Chinese language,intonation has always been challenging when teaching Chinese as a second language.Of the four tones,the third is not only the most difficult to learn,but also the most difficult to teach.Therefore,there has been much discussion surrounding the focus on sound teaching.Whilst this has been studied by many scholars,it has mainly been confined to theory and only limited acoustic experiments have been undertaken to validate these theories.This paper details studies made utilizing students of Carey Baptist Grammar School as the research objects,utilizing two comparative teaching approaches across two Grade 3 classes.One class was taught utilizing full tone teaching,and the other with half tone teaching.Over a period of time,two comparative experiments were conducted to determine the most effective method.There were 24 subjects in the audio-visual experiment,and the number of words per person was 16.This produced a sample size of 352 cases(21*16)in total.Tests were carried out utilizing a dictation table.This was divided into 2 areas,one focusing on the tone in isolation,and the other as part of a group of tones.Students were assessed on their ability to correctly identify the tones in both scenarios.Accuracy tests showed there was little difference in the accuracy of dictation when focusing on the tone in isolation.In the test involving a group of tones,accuracy of the whole group was slightly higher than that of the upper half.Phonetic experimentation provides an acoustic analysis of students 'sound pronunciation'.Subjects included in this trial comprised 16 students,8 males and 8 females,each of whom were assessed in their pronunciation of 12 words.This provides a sample of 192 words(16*12).Experimental data was collected via recording,and speech samples were analyzed in Praat audio analysis software.In conducting this analysis,base frequency,modulation value and modulation range were assessed via the T value method.Results showed that pronunciation in this sample was better than that of the whole group,both in the single word and the double word focus areas.One can conclude from this comparison experiment that the above teaching approach is of greatest benefit when focusing on the half tone.At the same time,the corresponding teaching for the third tone could be improved with increased practice both in speaking and listening,focusing on tone combinations(rather than simply in isolation),controlling the length of the down tone,and the delay to the upper tone to enable easier recognition.