Journal Article

The use of utterance-final particles in Mandarin teaching

曾金金, 丁多永

2020

Overview

本文旨在探討在線上互動中實習教師與學生句末語氣詞使用情形。結果顯示,教師句末語氣詞的使用比例為37%,明顯高於學生的15%。教師使用頻率最高的為「嗎」, 佔教師出現語氣詞總數的58%, 學生使用頻率最高的為「嗎」、「啊」,各佔學生出現語氣詞總數的36%。本文亦對兩岸教師、母語為華語與非華語之教師以及家中使用與不使用華語之學生的句末語氣詞使用頻率差異進行了比較。最後, 輔以說話者的身分類別進行綜合比較, 發現教師身分對華語母語教師的語氣詞使用類型及頻率皆有影響。本文分析真實教學互動情境中出現的語氣詞研究結果, 不僅能為現有兩岸句末語氣詞研究的語料佐證, 亦能實際應用於華語教學。 The purpose of this study is to explore the use of Mandarin utterance-final particles in online teacher-student interactions. The interactions were carried out by 15 preservice teachers who were graduate students at the Department of Chinese as a Second Language and 6 learners of Chinese as a second language in Singapore. After four online-interaction sessions (24 classes in total), we tagged utterance-final particles in the sentences of the corpus produced from conversation between the teachers and students. The results show that utterance-final particles spoken by students are Ma (嗎) >  A (啊) >  O (喔) >  Ba (吧) >  Ye (耶) >  Ne (呢) =  La (啦) >  Wa (哇), in the order of decreasing frequency. Yo (唷) or Ma (嘛) did not appear in the students’ speech. The utterance-final particles were used in 15% of the total number of turns by the students, and their most frequently used particles were Ma (嗎) and A (啊), each accounted for 36% of their total number of utterance-final particles. Utterance-final particles produced by the preservice teachers are Ma (嗎) >  Ne (呢) > A (啊) >  O (喔) >  Ba (吧) >  Ye (耶) >  Ma (嘛) >  Luo (囉) >  La (啦) =  Wa (哇) >  Yo (唷), in the order of decreasing frequency. The utterance-final particles were used in 37% of the total number of turns by the preservice teachers, and their most frequently used utterance-final particle was Ma (嗎), which accounted for 58% of their total number of utterance-final particles. This study also looked into the factors that may influence the use of utterance-final particles, such as regional Mandarin variations (Taiwan vs. Mainland China), preservice teachers’ primary language (Mandarin or other languages), where the second language learners are originally from, and whether Chinese heritage students speak Mandarin at home. The rate using utterance-final particles of Taiwanese teachers was 8% higher than that of Mainland Chinese teachers, and this result agrees with our general impression on utterance-final particles occur more frequent in Taiwanese Mandarin. The heritage students who speak Mandarin at home used utterance-final particles 2% more than those who do not. The teachers whose primary language is Mandarin used 11% more of the utterance-final particles than those who speak other languages. In addition, the rate using utterance-final particles of Taiwanese teachers was 8% higher than that of Mainland Chinese teachers, and this result agrees with our general impression on utterance-final particles occur more frequent in Taiwanese Mandarin. In this study, we realized that various factors may affect the frequency of using specific utterance-final particle, such as the power and solidarity between the speaker and the hearer, such as teacher to student. Additionally, our result shows that language background also plays a role in how a speaker uses utterance-final particles. In our future research, we will further analyze the factors that determine the frequency of Mandarin utterance-final particles.