Experimental Research On The Teaching Of Disyllable Neutral Tone Words To Thai And English Students

Neutral tone,one of the common sound-altering phenomenon in Chinese,is indispensable knowledge for second language learners while studying,and it plays an important role in oral expression due to its function of differing meanings.Some errors,for example,pronouncing neutral tone as its original state or in wrong place,still exist even at students' middle and advanced level.The neutral tone's ananysis based on experiments are conduted on the students whose mother tongue are Thai and English in this paper which depicts these two groups' pronunciation in neutral tone objectively by contrasting with standard Mandarin speakers.This paper,which introduces a phonetics-analysis software into class as supplementary means,observes whether this method is helpful for the study of neutral tone or not and put forward some suggestions to these students.This paper is divided into six chapters as followed.The first chapter is an introduction which discusses the experimental research background,research significance and research status of related topics.The second chapter is the description of design such as experiment participants,experimental materials and data processing.The third chapter is the neutral-tone syllable's durational and pitch experiments and results analysis on four tones in Mandarin and neutral tone words,then it finds out students' errors in durational and pitch.The forth chapter is about the error analysis on neutral tone which pays more attention to errors' contributing factors on these two groups of students.The fifth chapter is about teaching experiments andresult analysis.The sixth chapter is about teaching suggestions in which some personal advice is put forward aiming at errors in neutral tone.