French and Russian students' production of Mandarin tones

French and Russian students' production of Mandarin tones

This paper discusses the tone acquisition of Chinese by students in the context of Indo-European languages. This paper conducted two experiments: (1) Using Zhang (2006)'s 'Somatically-Enhanced Approach' (SEA) to conduct small-scale teaching experiments to the effectiveness of SEA on error correction of intermediate French and Russian students. ''Somatically-Enhanced Approach'' is centered on the body, teaching through humming, clapping, rhythm and movement to increase learners' sensitivity to tone and rhythm through language rhythm. The data in this thesis comes from the output of a Chinese class oral test of six French and Russian exchange students in a private university in Taiwan. (2) In the second experiment, all the spoken language corpus of French and Russian students were provided to ten native speaking Chinese teachers for analysis. After a one-semester study of the ''Somatically-Enhanced Approach'' in this research, Russian students and French students demonstrated that they could correctly pronounce the correct tones when speaking Chinese, with enhanced fluency in natural speech. The results of this study will be presented through quantitative (statistical data) and visualization and Praat was used to analyze the collected classroom spoken data and explore the sources of the errors.