ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce phonetic and phonological knowledge, and explore how it facilitates Chinese pronunciation teaching, including how to teach or help L2 learners acquire tones, Pinyin, and some unique consonants and vowels in standard Chinese, from a linguistic perspective. First, tones are the salient features in standard Chinese that are used to distinguish lexical meanings. The author explains the nature of Tone 3, the T3 sandhi and its pedagogy. Then, the gap between perception and production is examined, in order to discuss how to produce native-like pronunciations based on its gap. Second, Pinyin is an auxiliary tool used to transcribe Putonghua’s pronunciation, mainly at the phonological level. Pinyin employs the Roman alphabet. The author introduces syllables, initials, finals and tones, and explained that each letter in Pinyin represents one or more vowels in details, and discusses phonological categories and phonetic variations based on Pinyin, and how teachers need use this kind of knowledge to teach Chinese pronunciations and Pinyin. Last, the author introduces some unique vowels and consonants in standard Chinese, and how to teach them according to the phonetic features of these segments.
