Probing Into The Acquisition Order Of Chinese Punctuation Marks Of American Students

It’s an important part of developing the student’s ability to write in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Punctuation marks are also an inseparable part of the written language.There is a lot of research on teaching punctuation marks in China,but most of them simply analyze the errors of using punctuation marks by foreign students and provide some corresponding teaching and correcting strategies.There is no analysis in the difficulty of learning punctuation.Moreover its lack of systematical study makes it difficult to get the attention of teachers and students.Meanwhile the acquisition order studies always focus on vocabulary,grammar and syntax,barely on the difficulty of punctuation acquisition and its acquisition order.According to some studies,learning efficiency and effectiveness can be improved if it follows the order of language development.Therefore,this paper will concentrate on exploring the acquisition order of punctuation marks.The article selects 10 commonly used Chinese punctuation marks and 8 corresponding English punctuation marks(there are no commas and French quotes in English),it then compares and analyzes those Chinese and English punctuation marks in three aspects character,form and meaning,trying to find out their similarities and differences.The degree of diversity between the Chinese and English punctuation marks is divided into six levels on the basis of these differences.At the same time,it also analyzes the function and usage of Chinese punctuation marks and compares their complexity in cognitive perspective,and divides its cognitive difficulty level into three levels.Punctuations that can be defined by meanings are classified as First Level and that by the semantics and context as Second and Third Level of cognitive difficulty.This paper collects error types from 118 target discourse(including versions of annotations and originals)of American students,and lists these into formal errors and functional errors.Formal errors include writing errors and line position errors.Functional errors are divided into three types,they are redundant(addition),mistake(wrong alternation)and missing(omission)errors.These errors are mostly caused and influenced by mother tongue interference,rule generalization of target language,cognitive difficulty,teaching materials and so on.At the same time,during sorting out statistics of the usage amount of punctuation and errors frequency of the students in international students’ compositions,I find that errors are caused mostly by language cognitive difficulty,followed by the negative language transfer,which provides a basis for determining the order acquisition of punctuation.In the end,this essay takes the cognition difficulty level of punctuation as the principal focus,and explores American foreign students’ acquisition order of Chinese punctuation marks by referring to the difference in the degree of difficulty in Chinese and English punctuation marks and the frequency of using punctuation as well as relative errors of in foreign students’ compositions.In accordance with this acquisition order,providing the corresponding teaching comments and strategies in syllabus,teaching materials,teachers,students and so on.