Between Sound and Voice: Teaching Chinese Tones To Non-Tonal Language Speakers

The production of highly intelligible syllables in Mandarin Chinese entails a successful production of tones, which poses a challenge for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The aim of the current paper is to address this issue by identifying the key tonal features contributing to tone intelligibility in the lexemes produced by Polish learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language. Samples of Polish female students’ tonal pronunciations at two stages of learning were selected and compared with productions made by a female native speaker of Mandarin Chinese from Taiwan. Four syllables produced by the students were selected from a corpus of read-out passages which had already been assessed for the intelligibility of monosyllabic lexemes by native judges. The students’ pronunciation samples (whose pronunciation improved from the A1 minus language level to A2) were analysed using pitch, fundamental frequency contour, and register span criteria, and then compared to the female native speaker’s pronunciations of the same syllables. Importantly, before the results of this analysis are presented, the simplified model of tones widely used in language instruction is compared and contrasted with the acoustic analysis of tonal productions made by the native speaker. This is done to show to what extent the simplified, widely used model reflects real-life tonal productions.

Voice Pedagogy for the 21st Century: The Summation of Two Summits

The Voice Pedagogy Interest Group held its second summit in May 2018 to establish and recommend a logical curriculum that prepares and trains those entering the voice teaching profession with knowledge and skills needed to succeed. This position paper codifies the expanding competencies necessary for a 21st century teacher of singing and presents a vision of the ideal singing teacher’s education, experience, knowledge, and skill.

Online and Face-to-Face Voice Instruction

Traditionally, post-secondary-level voice training has relied upon face-to-face interaction. Concerns about the viability of the online environment to facilitate the interaction needed to teach discipline-specific vocal skills has delayed adoption of online voice teaching in online music programs. This chapter discusses online and face-to-face voice instruction and presents evidence of a research study examining the two delivery methods. The study examined the difference in pitch accuracy improvement scores of 78 female collegiate voice majors at a large university in the mid-Atlantic United States in an effort to determine efficacy of online voice instruction and traditional face-to-face voice instruction according to pitch accuracy improvement. These results demonstrate that no significant difference was found between pitch accuracy improvement scores of 37 voice majors trained and tested online versus 41 voice majors tested face-to-face, suggesting that online voice training is as effective as traditional face-to-face voice training pertaining to pitch accuracy instruction.