With the introduction of sentence patterns teaching in 1970s, the flow of speech teaching was proposed. The flow of speech teaching emphasizes to learn speech sounds in the flow of speech. Ten years later, it was widely used to teach Mandarin language because it can correct the foreigners’ accent. The components of Chinese language should coordinate with each other. So we should learn by flow of speech.

In the teaching process, the teachers in Chinese language school may find that the students have no problem in learning and imitating when teaching single sound. However, when hold each character together into a sentence, the pronunciation of some characters will be changed in the floe of speech. It indicates that it s not enough to pronunciation of characters or words.

First of all, teacher should teach the basic pronunciation by flow of speech. Learning the speech sounds is just a tool and the final goal is to help learners who study Chinese speak naturally and fluently. Some students may think they have learned Chinese better when they articulate the single syllable or character correctly. But it is wring because there can be some changes in flow of speech.

For the westerners who come to learn Chinese in China, the most obvious problem is the tone. They always articulate the tone, intonation and rhythm. For example, when teacher teach they say “你好（nǐ hǎo）”, they can teach them the morphemes “n, h, ao” and the changes of the tones in Chinese language. After training from syllable to sentence, they will master the tones.

Secondly, by making use of flow of speech, teachers can teach the difficult pronunciation. For some foreigners who learn Mandarin in China, it is hard to articulate the difficult speech sounds. However, when we apply them to the flow of speech, it can be easier. For instance, some students may fail to articulate “ɑn” separately. But they will manage to articulate it in the flow “天安门”.

Last but not least, teachers can use the flow of speech to correct the wrong pronunciation. For some really difficult speech sounds, students may lose confidence if they train too much. At this time, teachers can help students who study in China to put them into flow of speech to correct the wrong pronunciation.

According to what we mentioned above, we can see that the flow of speech is very important in Chinese language learning, especially the pronunciation learning. It should be applied to the pronunciation teaching.