How to teach Mandarin pronunciation

[mirgcire]

I have been teaching Mandarin now for over 6 years.  Many of my students have gone on to surpass my level of skill, which, for a teacher, is more of a success than a failure.  I think I do a great job of encouraging students to persevere and be successful.  At least 50% of my students have moved on to the next level, and more 10% have stuck with it for more than a year. I am currently 5 weeks into a a 10 week class with a group of adults that are, on average, 30 years old.  Tonight I noticed that their greatest impediment to pronouncing Chinese correctly was the inclination to simply over emphasize their English tonality.  I am pretty sure I did the same thing 15 years ago when I started learning mandarin, but eventually I became fascinated by the rhythm  of Mandarin. 

My question is: how do I convince my students to stop speaking Mandarin with an English accent.

 

[imron]

Get them to record themselves and listen back to it.

 

This also helps train their ear for correct Mandarin.

[roddy]

And just *constantly* remind them. It's a long iterative process. There's a very damaging tendency to teach pronunciation in the first three lessons and then not go near it again - teachers aren't sure how to teach it, and there's a 'good enough for foreigners' or 'as long as you're understood'* attitude. Build it in to every lesson, just for a few minutes and correct pronunciation as you would grammar or vocabulary. Maybe look to TEFL resources for pronunciation ideas.

 

Don't dismiss older-style ideas like drilling. Done briefly and with enthusiasm it's a useful tool. What I was taught was...

1) You've got to get everyone's utterances synced up, or you can't spot problems. Have clear signals (drop of a finger or something)

2) Once everyone is in sync you'll be able to hear if there's a problem somewhere, but probably not who it's originating with. So split the class in two. "Ok, just the left side now. Right side, listen to see if they get it right"... "Ok, back left quarter..."... "John, just you..." "Ok, it's -ang, you're saying -an... don't worry, it's way better than last week..."

If the class knows they'll be held to account like this they'll take far more responsibility and you'll see them benchmark themselves against your model and the other students as you go. 

 

There's perhaps also an inclination to move on to more 'advanced' skills and not 'waste' time on basics. Personally I can't think of a better foundation to give students.

 

*Which as I'm very fond of saying, is only true if you don't care about the poor ears of those you speak to. 

[Hofmann]

15 hours ago, mirgcire said:

how do I convince my students to stop speaking Mandarin with an English accent.

There's no convincing to be done. They all probably want to speak like a newscaster, but they don't know what the problem is and what they should do. An English accent is made up of many phonological patterns, and different learners exhibit different ones to different degrees. You can start with how your think about and describe phonological errors. Make sure you know exactly what the problem is, and what has to change to make it correct. You can't be satisfied with describing the problem as "English tonality." What does that mean?

• If it means "there are no phonemic tones," break down utterances into single syllables, then two syllables, then four, etc.
• If it means "plosives are voiced where they should not be," explain how English lacks voiceless unaspirated plosives except after fricatives such as /s/, and say "spy" and stuff and try to isolate the "py" part.
• If it means "there are stressed syllables where there shouldn't be," incorporate it into your tone training feedback.

In any case, you must nitpick everything. This is an intensive, one-on-one (expensive) activity.

[mirgcire]

Roddy and Imron, thanks for the great suggestions.  I will follow both of them.

 

What do you guys think of the pronunciation training feature of the "Chinese Skill" app.  If you open the pinyin chart in the app, select a tone mark and tap a syllable, it will play a recording, then as soon as the user records their own voice and the app will alternate between the users voice and the model voice for as long as you let it.  The app doesn't tell them what they are doing wrong, but it gets their voice out of their own head and, hopefully, allows them to hear the difference.

[oceancalligraphy]

I think it might help to break down where the English accent occurs.

 

Does it occur in pronouncing the individual sounds? I wonder if they are having trouble disconnecting the English pronunciation when they see pinyin, and not able to insert the Chinese pronunciation. Or maybe they really need to overemphasize the Chinese pronunciation.

 

Or is the problem with tones? A way to pay attention to tones are adding hand/arm gestures while reading aloud. Maybe also something to add when drilling as well.

[mirgcire]

@oceancalligraphy Most of them do reasonably well with tones when reciting words written in pinyin, but when it comes to speaking a sentence to one of their classmates they seem to be totally flummoxed.  To me it looks like their brains are sending two conflicting message to the mouth and the result is more often than not: Mandarin syllables with English tones. 

[roddy]

12 hours ago, mirgcire said:

hopefully, allows them to hear the difference.

Probably 20 times more valuable with a teacher. Learners will simply filter all Chinese phonemes into the phonemes they already know* - hence why they'll complain of not being able to hear a difference between che and zhe if it's not a distinction their language makes. There's a process from hearing the difference (say in a spot-the-odd one out activity... zhang, zhou, che, zha ) onto deliberate production on to... well, just being able to say it.

 

If you can't find good pronunciation resources for Chinese, look to what's available for English and adapt. This could easily be changed for Chinese. 

 

* This happens early, and it's why I'm intensely sceptical about the 'oh, sit down with a recording of a native speaker and figure it out' approach: "Infant phonetic discrimination is initially language universal, but a decline in phonetic discrimination occurs for nonnative phonemes by the end of the 1st year" (pdf)

[mungouk]

On 7/19/2018 at 2:31 PM, mirgcire said:

looks like their brains are sending two conflicting message to the mouth

 

As a relative beginner I can relate to this. My teacher says my tones and pronunciation are good during my 1:1 lessons, but from recent experience out in the wild I'm aware that when trying to actually use the language the long-hard-wired tendency to use English intonation (e.g. rising pitch in a question), or for tones to go haywire if you become stressed, really messes things up.

Major re-wiring of the brain is required here I think.  Which is one of the fascinating aspects of learning languages, right? ?

 

[roddy]

Maybe build in very simple activities based around things you know they can do easily - telling the time, introductions, even numbers, but warn them because the actual content is easy, you're going to be very strict on pronunciation.

[mirgcire]

@roddy Perhaps I should have mentioned that students I am describing learned numbers two weeks ago and most are in their 30's.  There is not much they can do "easily".  Also, the class is just once a week, so individualized drilling is hard to accomplish. Non-the-less, your observations are accurate and the suggestions are excellent..

[Dawei3]

My sense is that the learners need something to listen to and to practice repeating back on their own.  I'm a big fan of Pimsleur's teaching approach because it teaches full sentences, not individual words.

 

To me, having people memorize how to say individual words is like teaching someone to sing this way:  memorize how to sing each word of a song and then have them sing the song.  If we taught singing this way, songs would sound terrible (and no one would want to sing because it's such a slow & boring way to learn).  By learning full sentences, the person gets to hear the cadence of the language and the result is they are much more fluent.  In addition, learning full sentences implicitly teaches grammar.  

 

 

[mungouk]

@Dawei3 I find that good audio exemplars are very helpful. For several months I've been using audio based testing on memrise, and drilling the audio files from HSK standard text, to the point where I can hear certain words clearly in my "mind's ear" at will, so I know the tones and pronunciation. 

 

The recent comments about this by @murrayjames on another thread resonated with me on this too. (Edit: found it.)