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.