An Experimental Study On Errors Of Mandarin Disyllabic Tone Of Thai Primary School Students Based On Language Flow

In the past,the research on Chinese learners learning tones of Mandarin mainly focused on the static category of monosyllabic tones,while in recent years,more and more researchers began to pay attention to the tones of words with two or more characters,but the research on the tones of words in different positions in sentences is still rare.Based on the comparative analysis of the tone systems of Mandarin and Thai,this paper studies on the tone performance of the double words of Mandarin at the beginning,middle and end of sentences of Thai primary school students using the acoustic experiment method.On the basis of 16 groups of bi-syllabic tone combinations in Putonghua,two words are designed for each group,which are respectively placed at the beginning,middle and end of the sentence.Students read them at normal speed.Their corpus data are collected through recording,and compared with native speakers' corpus data by Praat,an acoustic experiment software,so as to study the errors of students' disyllabic tone based on continuous language flow.The experimental results show that there are the following errors in Thai primary school students' Mandarin tone based on language flow: Firstly,their tone range is way too narrow;Secondly,changes are small for the range of tone type,the tone involved in the change is basically in the same interval;Thirdly,their tone is too long,and the last word is generally longer than the first word.For each tone of Mandarin,there are the following errors: Students have serious trouble in pronouncing the second tone and the fourth tone wherever they are in the sentence;They only basically make mistakes in pronouncing the third tone which is at the end of the sentence;The first tone is basically correct in all the positions of sentence.In view of the errors above,we explores the causes of the error guiding with the theory of error analysis,which are interlingual errors,intralingual errors,training errors and cognitive errors,and based on all that,puts forward the following teaching methods: comparing the Chinese and Thai tone system,establishing the awareness of tone system;showing more input of tone,strengthening the awareness of tone range and type;increasing listening and speaking practice for the difficulty of tone;choosing better teaching materials,improving teaching methods.