Research on Enhancing Mandarin Initials Pronunciation Accuracy for Primary School Students in the Amdo Tibetan Regions

In China, promoting Mandarin is crucial for enhancing communication and development among all ethnic groups. The accurate pronunciation of initials poses a significant challenge for Tibetan students when learning Mandarin due to the influence of their mother tongue, resulting in pronunciation biases. This paper investigates the learning of Mandarin initials by primary school students in the Amdo area from listening and speaking perspectives. We used experimental phonetics and Practor’s "Hierarchy of Difficulty" theory to analyze the specific pronunciation biases of these students. By integrating data and spectrogram analysis, we characterized the students’ initial learning patterns, identified reasons for mispronunciations, and categorized the difficulty levels of initial pronunciation. Additionally, we proposed a teaching strategy to enhance the precision of initial pronunciation for Tibetan students.