An Investigation On Chinese Vocabulary Level And Problems In Chinese Writing Of Overseas Students

Listening,speaking,reading,and writing are the four basic skills in Chinese learning.Chinese writing is one of the most difficult skills for Chinese learners because of the complex Chinese writing system,the flexible use of words and the sentence structures.It is difficult to improve Chinese writing ability of overseas students in Chinese teaching.At present,studies and researches on Chinese writing ability of the advanced level of HSK Level 5 and above are limited.Thus,it is necessary to do further studies and various researches on the advanced level of Chinese writing ability of overseas students.There are 34 overseas students who have passed the test of HSK Level 5,took part in this Chinese writing test.The research methods include: 1.To test the testees’ Chinese vocabulary level of HSK Level 5.2.To test the testees’ with the writing test of HSK Level 5 of Hanban.The test also provides a questionnaire to investigate the needs of Chinese writing.3.To collect the data,and analyze the data with SPSS 21 and Excel.Based on the results,this report will analyze the testees’ level of their Chinese vocabulary and the correlation between their writing ability and their vocabulary level.4.To analyze the various language problems in the Chinese writing tests.Based on the above research results,the findings are as follows: 1.In the vocabulary test,the Chinese vocabulary level of the 34 testees is about HSK Level5.However,most of the words used in writing are that of HSK Level 3.This shows a gap between the words they know and the words they can use in writing.The words that the testees can use are very limited compared with the words they know.Their knowledge of the depth of Chinese words is also limited.2.The statistical data display the weak correlation between the testees’ writing ability and their vocabulary.This shows that the vocabulary has some effect on the testees’ writingability,but there are other factors,such as potential grammatical ability.3.The statistical data also shows that the negative correlation between the testees’ vocabulary level and the rate of the wrongly used words,and negative correlation between the testees’ vocabulary level and the complex degree of the used words in writing.So in this test,the data shows no correlation between the vocabulary level and the words used in writing.4.The language problems in the testees’ Chinese writing include: 1)The rate of wrongly written Chinese characters and wrongly used characters is at a high level.2)The testees can not use proper words in proper contexts.There are also misused parts of speech and the collocation mistakes.3)There are also many grammatical and illogical mistakes in sentence writing.4)In discourse,though testees have the ability of writing sentences,but in passage writing,the rate of accurate use of transition words is at a low level,and the testees have poor ability of writing a coherent paragraph on a specific topic.5)In punctuation,the testees can only use a few kinds of punctuation marks,and the main problems are the omission and misuse of punctuation marks.All this prevent the testees express themselves clearly and coherently.From the results above,we can draw some implications.First of all,we should encourage Chinese language learners to use the words they learned actively in writing.Secondly,we should emphasize the comprehension and usage of the words of the advanced level in Chinese language teaching.Thirdly,we should strictly train the learners writing skill,and explain the mistakes they make in writing.Or we may train the learners the ability of academic writing based on their needs.The limitations of this research are as follows: 1.This research only tests the testees the passage writing of HSK Level 5.Other types of writing are not tested.2.Because there are only 34 testees who took part in the test,the results are limited to some extent.