Malagasy And Chinese Wh-questions:a Contrastive Analysis And Study On The Chinese Learning Difficulty

This paper is a Contrastive Analysis between Malagasy and Chinese Wh-questions based on the errors on the topic made by the Malagasy students learning Chinese as a Second Language. Using Contrastive Analysis to study and explain the errors occurring as shown by the language transfer theory and by the means, find an effective way to overcome the teaching problems. This paper considers that the mistakes happens due to differences in the grammatical structure and a complicated lexical meaning use in Malagasy Wh-question words. This paper systematically studies 7 Malagasy Wh-questions and their matching 7 Chinese Wh-questions, both in the interrogative and the non-interrogative forms. The study is mainly divided in six sections. The first section is the basis of the research where the matter is brought up, introducing Malagasy and Chinese Wh-questions. We found out that Malagasy(VOS word order, Austronesian language) Wh-questions have a specific grammatical system mainly using the focus(FOC) “no” and the Subject(S) is never put at the beginning of a Wh-question sentence. Wh-question words are made of simplex words(single morpheme words) and compound words(compounds) which affects the lexical use. The second section is an analysis of the differences betweenthe two, we found out that apart from the Chinese interrogative structure Q+V+O,most of the Chinese and Malagasy interrogative structures doesn’t match to each other.Concerning the lexical meanings, we found out that Malagasy Wh-questions are mainly made of polysemous words. As for the grammatical use, we also found some specific features, mainly described as overlapping structures(double repetitive word structures) especially the“na….na….”structure,the match for the Chinese“bu guan…dou/ye….”structure. Based on the findings from the second part,thethird part classifies the Chinese Wh-question words learning difficulty by level,using Clifford Prator’s theory(1967), the result shows that most of the Chinese Wh-question words and grammatical structures are as of high difficulty for Malagasy Chinese learners. The fourth section is an error analysis, where we explain and study the errors often made by the Malagasy students, both in grammatical and lexical use.As the paper argued at the beginning on the matter of the language transfer theory, the research shows that most of the errors could be found in the structures of the first language. In the fifth section, some proposals for a much more effectiveways to improve the teaching of the Chinese Wh-questions are given, mainly focused on the translation teaching approach. The sixth and last section concludes.