Teaching Chinese Tones: Innovative Approaches

Jingyu Zhao (赵婧钰)
Teaching Assistant
Department of Asian Studies
Seton Hall University

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Chinese tones can be taught to non-native speakers.  Chinese tones can be a problematic area to both second language learner and the Chinese teacher. This paper compares the English stress and intonation with Chinese tones. It will provide certain samples; by analyzing the samples, problems in learning tones will be discussed. According to the problems in tones learning, it focuses on creates different kinds of tasks to help the learners learn the tones more effectively. Also, it introduces certain technologies such as concept map to help the learners correct their tones.