THE TEACHING OF MANDARIN PROSODY: A SOMATICALLY-ENHANCED APPROACH FOR SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS
Creators: name: Zhang, Felicia
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Linguistics
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: Language

description: For adult English speakers studying Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese), the acquisition of<br>the Mandarin prosody presents major difficulties. One particularly problematic aspect of the<br>Mandarin prosodic system, and the one singled out for research here is the acquisition of tones<br>by second language (L2) learners of Mandarin. This thesis involves a literature review and a<br>description of an experiment conducted for the purpose of assessing the effectiveness of a new<br>teaching method for educating students in Mandarin prosody generally, but especially with<br>regard to "tones."<br>Most studies investigating the acquisition of Mandarin tones by L2 learners have treated tones<br>as separate from other aspects of Mandarin prosody such as stress, loudness and duration. The<br>teaching method examined in this thesis, however, takes an alternative approach. Here the<br>acquisition of Mandarin prosody is approached as a complex dynamic that has tones as an<br>integral part.<br>The aims of the study are twofold: (1) to identify the principal problems encountered by most<br>learners in order to discover the causes of recurrent error patterns and, (2) to find out how a<br>multi-sensory approach, which in this study was called the Somatically Enhanced Approach<br>(SEA), might influence the acquisition of Mandarin prosody in these areas.<br>The experiment involved 22 adult Australian students studying Mandarin in the first three<br>months of language training. The experimental component of the study consisted of an<br>evaluation of two groups of students’ oral conversations. The two groups of students were<br>divided into a control group and an experimental group. The control group was trained in a nonmulti-sensory but communicative approach in 2001 and 2002. Their results are compared with<br>those of a test group and with a group of students trained in the multi-sensory communicative<br>approach (SEA) in 2003 and 2004. The test materials consisted of short dialogues that were<br>likely to occur in everyday communication. Data was collected from each group, once during<br>the first half of the first semester of study in each year.<br>The findings of the experiment were that the order of difficulty of the four Mandarin tones was<br>found to be similar for both the experimental and control groups of students. However, the order of difficulty differed from what has been reported by previous researchers. This suggests that<br>the input and the type of task used to collect data might exert a significant influence on the<br>learning of tones. In other words, the performance of subjects in the dialogues suggests that in<br>the initial stages of learning, the major cause of errors was first language (L1) interference<br>rather than the physical "difficulty" of articulating particular phonemes (or any features of<br>Universal Grammar). Therefore, by using a multi-sensory approach (SEA) to the learning of<br>Mandarin, it may be possible to considerablly lessen the influence of learners’ L1 from the<br>outset.<br>Finally, a number of suggestions for improving the teaching of Mandarin prosody are made and<br>future research directions outlined. Some salient suggestions for teaching of Mandarin prosody<br>that arise from the research are:<br>(1) To use movement and gesture in the early stages of learning to enhance students’ perception<br>and production of Mandarin. This approach provides students with useful memory tools for<br>learning both in class and in self-accessed learning;<br>(2) To teach Tone 3 not as a full Tone 3 but as a low level tone. This should not be done solely<br>through a simple verbal explanation but through a combination of movement and gesture,<br>provision of visual and auditory feedback and a large amount of exposure and perception<br>training so that Tone 3 is recognised as a low level tone rather than a full Tone 3. By so doing<br>confusion is reduced between the various realizations of Tone 3 during the initial learning<br>stages; and<br>(3) To caution students about the common error patterns caused by interference from their L1.<br>This should be supplemented with opportunities for students to observe their own production of<br>Mandarin and then experience how physically they can find ways of reducing the interference.<br>A qualitative analysis of interview and question data obtained from this research also revealed<br>that the extensive use of computer enhanced language learning and SEA work well together, not<br>only efficiently conditioning students to the phonology of Mandarin, but dramatically changing<br>students' strategies in learning and increasing their learning opportunities.