A Study On The Teaching Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

The sentential construction of "shi…de" has been highly valued as a special sentence pattern in teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCSL) and been exclusively listed in the "the Syllabus of Graded Grammar for HSK".These two function words "shi" and "de" are ubiquitous in Chinese language expression which have been fully studied by many scholars and these studies supported our research theoretically in TCSL.This academic thesis will study the difficulties that overseas students have when they acquire the sentential construction of "shi…de" from the practical angle and aim to guide the teaching experience.The first part of this paper is the preface. We summarized the academic review in this part, and stated the reasons for choosing this topic, expected goals, contents, methods and theories. On the basis of the preface we start chapter 1. In chapter 1, we absorbed important results from the research of language ontology by telling the differences from the sentential construction of "shi…de" and "[shi+de]", also making it clear about the position of "shi" and "de". As a result, we described the basic connotation of the sentential construction of "shi…de" and divided the sentential construction of "shi…de" into several different sub-constructions.Sentential construction 1:"shi+ adverbial+ verb+ (object)+ de". This construction is to explain one aspect related to the verb,such as time, places, ways, conditions, aims and so on.Sentential construction 2:"shi+ subject-predicate structure+ de". This construction is to emphasize the agent of verb which is exactly the focus of information and often used in past perfect tense.Sentential construction 3:"shi+ adjective components+ de". Here the adjective composition can be either character adjective or adjective phases.Sentential construction 4:"shi+ verbal components+ de". Here the verbal composition, in general, can be "volitive auxiliary+ verb" structure or "verb+ possibility complement" structure or verb phases.In chapter 2,we designed a questionnaire to survey the overseas students in Nanjing Normal University on the use of the sentential construction of "shi…de". With the method of data statistics, we collect the corpus and errors and analyzed the classification and the causes of the errors. When we investigate the condition in which students acquire the construction combined with the context, we found that the error rate is obviously increasing and the types of error are different among overseas students who are in different Chinese language levels. In addition, we summarized the types of error into four, namely omission, overrepresentation, addition, misordering, and meticulously analyzed the four sub-constructions. And then, we analyzed the causes of errors from three aspects, those are negative transfer of target language, the study strategy of learners and the influence of study environment.Chapter 3 puts forward suggestions on teaching the sentential construction of "shi…de" in TCSL. First, pay attention to the join of ontology research and TSCL. Second, lay emphasis on the teaching of related grammar items of "shi...de" construction. Third, take it seriously about the connection of context and the language sense teaching. At last, following the principles above, we designed the teaching plan about this grammar providing the reference for teachers.