Difficulties And Strategies For Korean Students In Learning Chinese Grammar

Korea's foreign language teaching is now aiming at the improvement of communication competence, for people have come to doubt whether it is necessary to teach students grammar in the foreign language teaching—due to the fact that the grammar-centered foreign language teaching in the past have been proved unsuccessful—and they even consider grammatical teaching as a dull, outdated method which is of no positive effect on the improvement of one's communication ability. As a result, many Korean students learning Chinese have no interest in grammatical study, and they ask to be taught nothing but oral Chinese only. The author of this thesis holds that though it may not a must for someone to be grammatically correct in practical communication, it is of on doubt that the correct use of grammatical rules will greatly improve the communication efficiency, and it is of great importance for Korean students to learn Chinese grammar, especially those unique in Chinese.With Koreans'increasing enthusiasm on Chinese learning, much has been done in the study of teaching Chinese as a foreign language in Korea. Among so many researches, however, only several research papers on Chinese, especially on the grammatical teaching of Chinese, can be found, and from these papers, one can merely read the simple and rough comparison between Korean and Chinese. Moreover, from the limited research papers on Chinese grammatical errors, one can only find the error analysis and no further suggestions on how to deal with the errors. In a word, in contrast to the upsurge of Chinese learning in Korea, studies focused on solving the problems appearing in Chinese language learning are far from enough.The author of this thesis, which is entitled Difficulties and Strategies for Korean Students in Learning Chinese Grammar, is therefore trying to find how many major grammatical difficulties Korean students can meet in their Chinese learning and grade them in order of difficulty. Based on the investigation conclusions, the author puts forward an intensive grammatical training project, which has been put into practice and proved to be a success according to the contrastive study made afterwards. The goals of the thesis are:to make people realize the importance and necessity of grammatical teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language; to help students get familiar with Chinese grammars, especially those on words order, and overcome the grammatical difficulties as soon as possible; to help Chinese teachers teach more efficiently by providing them with an intensive grammatical training project.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One puts forward the motivation, goals, necessity, content of the research, and the organization of the paper.Chapter Two makes a review of the theories of second language acquisition, mainly those related to this research. At the beginning of the chapter is a comparison between first and second languages acquisition, and an introduction to the theories of contrastive analysis, interlanguage and error analysis, and then follows a review and analysis of the studies on teaching Chinese as a foreign language (for Korean students) between 2000 and 2008, including the papers written by Korean MAs graduated in Shanghai and Beijing colleges and universities, as well as the research articles on comparative and contrastive studies between Korean and Chinese, which are published in Chinese Learning, Chinese Teaching in the World, Spoken and Written Language in Practice, and Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages.Chapter Three is centered on Grammar (especially word order)—to predict, by a comparison and contrast between Korean and Chinese, what are the possible grammatical difficulties (especially on word order) to Koreans learning Chinese. At the beginning of the chapter, the author briefly reviews the grammatical features of Korean and Chinese, with a special attention to their differences in word order, then predicts the possible grammatical difficulties (especially on word order) to Korean students, points out the significance and necessity of grammatical teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and suggests the requirements in and content of grammatical teaching.Chapter Four is the core of the whole thesis—three investigations. The respondents of the investigations, including junior and senior high school students, housewives, office workers, are mainly composed of undergraduates, most of whom have lived in Shanghai for more than three years and learned Chinese for more than one and a half years. Respondents are required to arrange the given words in order to form a Chinese sentence with the meaning shown in Korean. The first investigation consists of 36 important grammatical items and 72 test items—two for each grammatical item; the second investigation involves 18 grammatical items thought to be most difficult according to the result of the first investigation, and 72 test items—four for each grammatical item; the third one contains 10 grammatical items ranked as the most difficult ones by the second investigation, and 40 test items—four for each grammatical item. From these three investigations, the author draws the following conclusions:the Chinese grammatical points which are thought to be most difficult to Koreans are the following (ranked by difficulty degree):complement of direction, complement of possibility, serial verb construction, adverbial, attributive, action-measure complement, complement of degree, Bei construction, Ba construction, and youdianr/yidianr sentence; students are more or less influenced by their native language Korean; for Chinese complement and serial verb construction, to which there are no counterparts in Korean, students need a particular learning so as to understand them and know how to use them properly.Chapter Five gives suggestions on how to teach or learn these grammatical difficulties effectively. The author puts forward an intensive grammatical training project (taking complement of direction, complement of possibility, and serial verb construction for example), which is elaborated from four aspects:the choice of qualified teachers, teaching content, the compiling of textbooks, and teaching methods. In order to test the efficiency of grammatical teaching, another contrastive investigation is made in this chapter. The respondents, who are students learning Chinese for 6-8 months during the period from March,2008 to 2009, are divided into two groups:group A are students who received intensive grammatical training, and group B are students who did not receive systematic grammatical training. The result is, the average grammatical error rate for group B is 60.9%—a quite high error rate, while the average grammatical error rate for group A is 36.5% lower than group B. So the author draws the conclusion that under the same learning conditions, students who receive intensive grammatical training have a better language performance.Chapter Six summarizes the chief conclusions and points out the limitations of the thesis.In the time of globalization, fluency in foreign language using is now considered as one of the essential qualities and in foreign language teaching people attach great importance to the improvement of communication competence. There exists a common misunderstanding, however, that grammatical teaching is useless in foreign language teaching aiming at the improvement of communication competence. As a matter of fact, a good mastery of a target language should be measured at least by four aspects: listening, speaking, reading and writing, all of which are very important and closely interrelated with one another. Correct application of grammatical rules in reading or speaking will surely of great help in the improvement of reading or speaking abilities. The author hopes that this research can make language teachers realize the significance of grammatical teaching, and the intensive grammatical teaching project suggested in the thesis will be of use in their teaching. The author also hopes that Korean students will rediscover the necessity to learn grammatical rules for the purpose of increasing their communication abilities, and, under the guide of their teachers, have a systematic grasp of Chinese grammars (especially word order) and learn to apply them to practical communication. Finally, the author also hopes that this thesis will arouse the interest of other researchers in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, who will make more valuable achievements on the basis of the existing research.