Motivate Students to Master the Chinese Tones with Chinese Rhythmic Verses

使用节奏汉语激励学生掌握汉语声调

John Jing-hua Yin （印京华）

University of Vermont （佛蒙特大学）

Learning to pronounce a single Chinese tone may not be challenging as any of the four tones in Mandarin Chinese can be found in English. However, learning to say a Chinese sentence that has a string of syllables with four different tones proves to be a very challenging learning task for American students. The conventional teaching approach has not been stimulating enough to keep our students motivated to learn to speak Chinese with correct tones. After years of our frustration over very minor success in helping students to get their tones right, we found that the reason why our teaching was not as effective as we would it to be is that we failed to understand and utilize the characteristics of Chinese in our teaching. When students do not have much success in mastering Chinese tones, they tend to give up improving their tones. To change this negative trend, we decided to try a new approach that utilizes the melodious and rhythmic nature of the Chinese language. We composed several dozens of rhythmic verses in Chinese and use one of them to begin or conclude each of our first-year and second-year Chinese classes. As each verse has the rhythm that can excite students easily, students enjoy listening and chanting these rhythmic verses. They are better motivated by these enjoyable rhythmic verses, and their pronunciations of Chinese sounds and tones are noticeably better. This paper presentation will focus on how this new teaching and learning approach works, specifically on how we may use Chinese rhythmic verses to motivate students to master the Chinese tones.