| As a new perspective for studying on the cohesion and coherence for Chinese discourses,the ontological studies on topic chains have been yielding abundant outcomes.However,very few were applied to the research and practices of Chinese teaching,especially in the area of advanced speaking teaching.Under this background,the recordings of the one-to-one classes of six students and study materials in the American Flagship Chinese Language Program are collected as the corpora.After the transcription of all the audio materials,the corpora of native speakers and learners are tagged meticulously.Subsequently,combined with the outcomes of ontological studies concerning anaphora,discourse cohesion,and coherence,and rhetoric relations,the description,and comparative analysis are carried out.The study consists of three parts.First of all,the use of sentences and topic chains is presented to confirm two difficulties.Second of all,the use of sentential subjects and sentential topics,which concerns POS and anaphora,is illustrated,and the causes resulting in learners’ overuse of nominal anaphora and pronominal anaphora are discussed to address the first difficulty.Third of all,the similarities and differences of the use of rhetoric relations between native speakers and learners are investigated,and the single-layer structures and multilayer structures are described and compared to address the second difficulty.The comparative analysis is conducted following the design of the three facets.As the results show,in the view of the data,the difficulties in forming and developing topic chains can be confirmed.The first difficulty is related to the bigger proportion of pronominal and nominal anaphora than zero anaphora,which is attributed to the influence from the typical position of topics,subordinate relationships,conjunctive words,typical grammatical position of the topic and intra-sentential pauses.The second one is connected with the fact that the single-layer and multilayer structures of rhetoric relations in learners’ discourses are not as dominant as that in native speakers’ discourses due to the inferior ability to use embedding function.It can explain why there are very few embedding structures and even more complex structures.All these factors cause difficulty in developing topic chains.In the end,based on the results of the comparative analysis,several teaching suggestions are brought forth.Teachers should raise students’ awareness of using discourse topics during teaching.It is essential to accentuate the functions of zero anaphora in Chinese discourses.In order to avoid the overuse of pronominal and nominal anaphora,teachers should take some strategies.For instance,teachers should instruct students to grasp the usage of atypical topic chains.Teachers should assist students in practicing the skills to develop topics.Take rhetoric relations as an example,teachers can help students distinguish different functions and stratification of it,and learn to use combing and inserting functions first and then embedding function,and learn to construct single structures first and then single-layer structures and then multilayer structures. |
