Topic Chain’s Performance Analysis Among Japanese L2 Learners

Chinese and Japanese are both topic oriented languages.Topic chains exists in both Chinese and Japanese.It is one of the most important forms of Chinese text structure,which will affect the coherence of the whole text.Based on the data of HSK dynamic composition corpus,this paper investigates the use of topic chain of Japanese Chinese learners,and analyzes the causes of problems in the use of topic chain.We found that the frequency of using dynamic topic chain is higher than that of static topic chain,but the accuracy of static topic chain is higher than that of dynamic topic chain.By analyzing the topic chains that correctly used,we found that there are differences between Japanese Chinese learners and Chinese native speakers in the types of short sentences in the topic chain,mainly in that the use rate of figurative short sentences and Chinese character small sentences is not as high as that of Chinese native speakers;in addition,Japanese Chinese learners also use more connectors in the dynamic topic chain than Chinese native speakers.By analyzing the topic chain that used improperly,we find that there are two main problems: One is the overuse of Zero Anaphora,that is,omitting the subject where the subject should not be omitted,leading to the ambiguity of sentence reference and semantic ambiguity;The other is the misuse of Explicit anaphora,which is mainly manifested in that for some short sentences around the common topic,they could have formed the topic chain with Zero Anaphora connection,but they used Explicit pronouns or nouns which resulting in the topic chain not formed.The ellipsis of Japanese subject mainly occurs in sentence groups,the subject can be omitted as long as it can be restored according to the context;The ellipsis of Chinese subject mainly occurs between clauses,the subject of clauses can be omitted,but the subject of a new sentence can not be omitted,this is the reason why Japanese Chinese learners use zero anaphora excessively.The misuse of explicit anaphora is mainly caused by the differences in the markers of Chinese and Japanese topics.Japanese topics have obvious prompt words "は",which is easy to identify.Chinese topics have no prompt words,sometimes topics have the function of subject,so it is difficult to distinguish subject and topic.Learners can’t recognize the topic of sentences,they don’t realize the connection between the clauses,they can only stack the clauses together,so there is a misuse of Explicit anaphora.Combined with the causes of the problems,we think that in the Chinese teaching of Japanese,we should pay more attention to the teaching of topic chain,and increase the teaching and practice of topic chain in the teaching materials;In the classroom teaching,teachers should make use of the comparison between Chinese and Japanese to clarify the differences between Chinese and Japanese in subject omission and Zero Anaphora,so as to improve the teaching effect of topic chain for Japanese Chinese learners.