The Tonal Language: Chinese

Some aspects of the Chinese phonological system cause difficulties for English speaker learners. One of the common difficulties is stress and intonation patterns, which are different between Chinese and English. Chinese is a tonal language. It doesn’t only mean that tones make up the Chinese words, but also means that the meaning of the Chinese word determined by the different tones. For American students, they also use stress and intonation patterns similar to tones, even though they did not realize, to express different feeling by variation.

In Chinese, the reason why having tones is that there are far fewer variations in sounds compared to most other languages, such as English. The source of difficulty in learning tones has generally been attributed to interference from first language features, with knowledge of the function of pitch in the English stress and intonation systems found to highly influence American listeners’ perception of Chinese tones (White, 1981; Broselow et al., 1987).

English speakers use intonation and stress to identify the words or to highlight the important words in a sentence. There are two situations: One is no matter how English speakers change one word tones without the context, the meaning itself does not change at all. For example, education↗ in rise tone and education↘ in fall tone express the same meaning. Another situation is that change the whole sentence intonation in context to convey different feelings and different meanings. One sentence can be comprehended by different ways because of the intonation variation. For example, the sentence ‘she is going back to China’ is usually said as a statement like-She’ is going back’ to ↘China. We may hear in another informal way: She’ is going back’ to ...

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...k the intern low level students to read drills and ask the inter advanced level students to answer what word they heard and translate its meaning. Then offer some sentences include Chinese tone's variations which are a challenge to the students, ask the students to try how to pronounce them. Help the students to pronounce the sentence correctly.

In order to fix the tone pattern in students mind, ear, and speech habits, I will require them repeat the sentences together then individual until they sound perfectly natural to them.

Differentiation:

Students in the classroom are all American students but within different cultural background. The student is intermediate low level and intermediate mid-level. I will separate different language proficiency level students into two groups in order students will not find it harder or easier to pronounce and recognize the tones.