A Phonetic Perspective: Teaching
Mandarin Pronunciation for Heritage and Non-heritage Students
Wenwei Du
Vassar College
It is now common
that a college Chinese class has a mixture of heritage and non-heritage
students. Within the group of non-heritage students, it is not uncommon to have
American natives and international students from Europe, Latin America, Africa,
Japan, Korea, or Southeast Asia.
As for those heritage students, they have been, to various degrees, influenced
by their parents’ Chinese dialects which include Cantonese, Min dialects, Wu
dialects and various Northern dialects. Each of the above described categories
has a distinctive feature in their pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese at
different stages. Based on my teaching and research experiences, I have
gradually developed a set of practical paradigms in helping these students
knowing the differences from the perspectives of phonetics between the accurate
sounds of Mandarin and the sounds that they each tend to mispronounce due to
the influences from their mother tongues and in teaching them how to correctly
pronounce those Mandarin sounds that do not exist in their mother tongues. The
paper consists of the following aspects in presentation:
1.
A phonetic map of commonly mispronounced sounds
corresponding to students’ mother tongues;
2.
Theoretical
and practical (which must be scientific) explanations between the accurate
sounds and the mispronounced sounds;
3.
Methods
of practice for corrections;
In
conclusion, the paper will comment on the degree of effectiveness of my methods
and ineffectiveness so that ideas for their improvement or criticism could be
drawn from the panel audience.