A Study Of Error Of Rhetorical Sentences By Foreign Students With Intermediate And Advanced Language Level

Rhetorical question is an important means in expressing emotions and meanings of Chinese and a sentence pattern which must be mastered by Chinese learners. Correct comprehension and application of this kind of sentence is specifically required for foreign students by various teaching programme of Chinese as a foreign language. However, the rhetorical question teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language does not get insufficient attention and its acquisition situation by foreign students is unsatisfactory.Over one hundred years, research on modern Chinese ontology of rhetorical questions has achieved fruitful results. Whereas the research field of rhetorical question teaching just firstly gets started since1990s, so does the research on rhetorical question teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. The research concerned from Zhao Lei, Dong Fulan, Yu Tianyu and so on indicates the commencement of the this central research direction, but some problems appear meanwhile, namely the limited thoughts and rare monograph works. In term of the acquisition errors of rhetorical questions, this paper on one hand provides some reference data and materials for further study of rhetorical question teaching through the investigation results and data in order to enrich the research content of rhetorical question teaching, which is the academic significance of this study; on the other hand the statistical and analytical results can be applied in teaching practice and provide references for teaching practice, which is the practical significance of this research.In the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, though some rhetorical questions appear in textbooks of the elementary period, the primary Chinese learners seldom use such kind of sentence because of their limited comprehension and expression level of Chinese. Even some rhetorical questions are acquired in the elementary period, but may be understood and used by learners in the middle and senior stages. Acquisition and use of rhetorical questions is mainly occurred in the middle and senior stages. Therefore, Chinese learners in the middle and senior levels are the subject of investigation and research in this paper. In accordance with the Practical Modern Chinese Grammar compiled by Liu Yuehua et al., rhetorical questions with mark words can be divided into19categories. Four mark words among them are selected to be the research objects in this paper, which are "Couldn’t it be""How come""Where""Isn’t..." respectively.Enough corpuses are needed to study errors, and the corpus in this paper is acquired through three methods. The first method is the questionnaire comprised of two parts, which are respectively applied to investigate the comprehension and application of rhetorical questions. The second is the corpus retrieval method, which acquires the needed corpus through inputting the mark words into the interlanguage corpus of Jinan University and combining both system retrieval and artificial screening. The third method is the collection with teaching practice, namely collecting the applied rhetorical questions in writing by students. After the statistical analysis of obtained corpus, firstly, it is found that "How come" is most commonly used by foreign students,"Couldn’t it be" then,"Isn’t..." and "Where" is less used. Secondly, it can be seen that the error types of rhetorical questions are relatively centralized, of which the supplementary element errors account for a large proportion and the modal verbs errors are especially prominent after the classification of errors of rhetorical questions used by foreign students.The difficulty in acquisition of rhetorical questions and the seldom use of this kind of sentence by foreign students are the results of various factors. This paper makes explanations in the end in terms of the teaching outline, the difficulty and characteristics of rhetorical question and the learning strategies used by learners respectively. Then three questions are raised to the middle and senior foreign students through the combination of questionnaire and deep interviews, in order to reflect the difficulty and predicament of rhetorical questions in teaching Chinese as a foreign language from the perspective of foreign students.