Reflection on the Teaching of Chinese Pinyin

Recently, I received many calls from parents of students asking about the pronunciation of the Chinese pinyin "O". Students and parents have different opinions on this, including "nest", "oh" and "oh".


After understanding, it is found that many parents will learn pinyin in advance through extracurricular training courses and online courses before their children enter school, in order to reduce the pressure on their children to learn Chinese pinyin. However, the professional level of teachers in these institutions and platforms is uneven, so it is difficult to guarantee the teaching quality. In fact, as a section of Chinese teaching, Chinese Pinyin is not paid as much attention as other sections, such as literacy, writing, reading and writing. Therefore, whether it is teaching seminars or training lectures, there is very little content about Chinese Pinyin, and even professional teachers have little chance to get relevant knowledge training. The pronunciation of "O" is a difficult point in pinyin teaching, because only modal particles such as "Oh" and "Oh" are close to the pronunciation of "O", and modal particles make different sounds because of the speaker’s different emotions and mouth sizes, so it is difficult to pronounce the sound of "O" accurately.


In pinyin teaching, the Chinese Pinyin Scheme is the basis and the curriculum standard is the program. The Ministry of Education once replied in official website that the "O" in Chinese Pinyin should be pronounced "Oh". There are 63 hanyu pinyin, including 6 single vowels. The pronunciation of monosyllabic vowels is characterized by loud voice, good mouth shape when pronouncing, and the mouth shape and tongue position remain unchanged. As one of the monosyllabic vowels, the letter "O" is a round lip sound. In addition to the pronunciation characteristics of monosyllabic vowels, the upper and lower lips are naturally rounded, the back of the tongue is contracted, and the back of the tongue is raised.


The above is a professional way to explain the pronunciation of the Chinese phonetic alphabet "O". In teaching, of course, we can’t explain academic terms and theoretical knowledge to students stiffly. We should learn the pronunciation of letters by teachers’ demonstration and students’ observation of teachers’ mouth shapes. There is another relatively simple and easy-to-learn method: pronounce a "bo" sound first, the sound is prolonged, the mouth shape remains unchanged, and the rest of the sound is "O". By analogy, syllables such as "Po", "Mo", "Fo" and "Wo" are pronounced with a continuous sound length, and the rest of the sounds are also the letter "O". In teaching practice, if it is difficult for students to pronounce the letter "O" correctly, there is no need to force it too much, because when they form syllables with other letters, it does not affect the overall pronunciation of syllables.


Facing the first-grade pupils, pinyin teaching is rich, vivid and intuitive, which can better protect children’s thirst for knowledge in learning Chinese, guide them to acquire new knowledge in interesting games and specific situations, and improve their literacy. In teaching, we can fully tap the resources of teaching materials and develop children’s language and thinking while teaching Chinese Pinyin. In the pinyin teaching part of the textbook, there are a large number of theme maps, which integrate the sound and shape of letters with the specific situations in life, making the originally boring letters become familiar, sensible and meaningful things. In teaching, teachers help students to pronounce correctly, master the shape characteristics of letters and reduce the difficulty of memorizing them by guiding them to practice reasonably in imagination and speaking.


In teaching practice, according to the provisions of Chinese Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education (2021 Edition), students "can read Chinese characters by using Chinese Pinyin, and learn to look them up in the dictionary by using phonetic order retrieval method and radical retrieval method", which emphasizes the instrumentality of Pinyin learning. The current unified Chinese textbook has also greatly reformed the teaching content of the first volume of grade one, delaying the learning content of pinyin, recognizing and writing some commonly used Chinese characters first, and then learning Chinese pinyin. At the same time, in pinyin teaching, the learning task of word recognition is properly arranged, and word recognition and learning pinyin are integrated with each other. This can make children’s "first impression" of Chinese not letters.ɑO, e ",but the Chinese character" heaven, earth and man ". This adjustment in the order of teaching content is to put Chinese and Chinese characters back to the first place, and Pinyin is only a tool to assist in learning Chinese characters, not an end.


When guiding children to learn Chinese Pinyin, we should accurately grasp the purpose of learning Chinese Pinyin, give full play to the auxiliary role of Chinese Pinyin in literacy and expression, cut unnecessary cumbersome links, create a relaxed, pleasant and diverse learning atmosphere for children’s Chinese learning, and make classroom teaching really reduce burdens and increase efficiency.


??(Author: Miao Yue, a Chinese teacher at Nanjie Primary School in Linfen City, Shanxi Province)


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