An Empirical Study On Improving The Accuracy Of Mandarin Tone For Preschool Children In Amdo District

Unlike Mandarin,which has four tones,the Tibetan Amdo dialect is a silent language with only habitual tones.Therefore,children whose mother tongue is the Amdo dialect of Tibetan have a significant bias in tone and pronunciation when speaking Mandarin,exhibiting an apparent "Tibetan accent" phenomenon.To address this issue,the thesis constructs a teaching strategy to improve the accuracy of Mandarin tone for preschool children in Amdo Tibetan Area by analyzing the reasons for tone bias and verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the teaching strategy.The main works and originalities of the thesis are as follows:Firstly,the thesis analyzes the distinction in tone between the Amdo dialect of Tibetan,Amdo accented Mandarin,and standard Mandarin.First,the thesis sorted out the differences between the Amdo dialect of the Tibetan language and the Amdo dialect of preschool children in the Amdo Tibetan area,as well as the monosyllabic and disyllabic tones between the Mandarin and Amdo dialects through a literature review.At the same time,the thesis also uses experimental phonetics methods to analyze the tone differences quantitatively.The thesis found that the order of difficulty in acquiring the tones of four monosyllabic characters is as follows: falling-rising tone>rising tone>falling tone>high and level tone.The most significant difficulty in acquiring 16 disyllabic tones is the combination of two falling-rising tones,while the smallest is the combination of two high and level tones.The thesis also uses survey research methods to investigate the difficulties in Mandarin tone teaching in the Amdo Tibetan area with a questionnaire and finds that the problems are the lack of understanding of tone among students and the lack of proper use of tone communication scenarios in the teaching environment.At the same time,the thesis also found through a survey questionnaire that acquiring the falling-rising tone is the most difficult whether it is students or teachers.Secondly,the thesis constructs a teaching strategy to improve the accuracy of Mandarin tone for preschool children in Amdo Tibetan Area.When completing the teaching strategy,the thesis considers the tone differences between the Tibetan Amdo dialect,Amdo accented Mandarin,and standard Mandarin with the difficulty of tone acquisition according to the results of experimental phonetics analysis by considering the theories of second language acquisition,language transfer,and situational cognition.Finally,the thesis verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed teaching strategy through quasi-experimental research.Because of COVID-19,we could not do experiments in the kindergartens in the Amdo Tibetan area,so the simulation experiment method was used to experiment.We invited 17 Tibetan college students from the Amdo district,who had similar tone levels to kindergarten children,as experimental subjects and divided them into experimental and control groups.The thesis conducted three stages of teaching experiments and obtained experimental results of one pre-test and three post-tests.The thesis designed a test corpus of 16 monosyllabic characters and 16 disyllabic characters,allowing participants to read aloud during the pre-test stage and after three experiments,and recorded the expected speech during the test.The thesis quantitatively calculates the pentatonic tone value of each syllable in the recording sample through the experimental phonetics method and compares it with the pentatonic tone value of standard Mandarin.The thesis also uses the mean opinion score(MOS)method to rate the tone accuracy of the recorded samples by 11 graduate students who speak standard Mandarin.The results showed that under strict control of unrelated variables,the experimental group had a faster rate of decreasing tone bias and improving MOS scores than the control group,especially with a significant improvement in falling-rise tone bias.This result indicates that the teaching strategy proposed in this thesis can improve the accuracy of Mandarin tone among students in Amdo Tibetan Area so.Therefore,the results indirectly proved that the proposed teaching strategy is practical and feasible for preschool children in Amdo Tibetan Area learning Mandarin tone.