Research On Negative Response In The Primary And Intermediate Listening Teaching Of Chinese As A Second Language

The negative response is a negative answer to utterances,such as a rejection,question,denial,opposition,etc.The ways of expressing negation are complex and various,which can be divided into direct negation with negative markers "bu","mei" and"bie",meaning "not",and indirect negation which makes use of lexical,syntactic,and pragmatic means without negative markers.Negative response occurs frequently in listening teaching of Chinese for beginners and intermediate learners as a foreign language,and indirect expressions are often used without negative markers,which students must infer the implied meaning from the context.But this language phenomenon hasn’t attracted the attention of relevant teachers and students.As a result,it hasn’t been dealt with in a systematical way in the Chinese listening classes,and it has become a difficulty in understanding spoken Chinese for most international students.I intend to call the close attention of both teachers and students to the negative response in this research paper.Through collecting and sorting the negative responses in the primary and intermediate listening textbooks and HSK papers,I managed to carry out the functional classification research in the first place in this paper.According to the speech act theory,the negative responses can be divided into a negative response to the suggestion,a negative response to the request,a negative response to the invitation,a negative response to the evaluation,and a negative response to the inquiry.In the second place,the ways of expressing negation were investigated.Negative responses can be divided into direct negation and indirect negation depending on whether there are negative markers.Direct negation includes a negative single sentence,a single sentence with a negative term and a complex sentence with a negative term;indirect negation can be divided into conventional indirect negation and non-conventional indirect negation.Conventional indirect negative expressing means include collocations,idioms,rhetorical questions,imperative sentences and complex sentences.Non-conventional indirect negations employ pragmatic strategies to express negative meanings,chiefly including topic-shifting strategy,fact-stating strategy,pausing for the right words strategy,partial affirmative strategy and low-profile strategy.In the third place,the paper analyzes the data of tests of and the distribution of the negative responses in the primary and intermediate listening textbooks and the HSK.Judging from the distribution,the overall frequency of negative responses in the textbooks and test papers reached 21.47%,but the frequency of negative responses found in the textbooks is nearly 10%lower than that in the HSK;The proportion of indirect negative responses in all the negative ones is 78.65%.Of the conventional indirect negation,the three most frequently used expressions are the rhetorical questions,the compound sentences and the collocations,and the fact-stating strategy is the most frequently used expression of the non-conventional indirect negation.Judging from the data of tests,the main types of questions are viewpoint-finding questions,detail-matching questions,and information-gathering questions.Finally,the status quo and problems of the negative responses in the listening teaching of Chinese are analyzed,and corresponding suggestions are put forward from the positions of teachers,students and textbook compilers.