The Study Of “Benlai”,“Yuanlai” And “Yuanben” And Suggestions For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Teaching and learning of words with similar meanings has been a crucial and demanding issue in teaching Chinese to international students.This thesis,based on an ontological comparison of the synonymous words “benlai”,“yuanlai” and “yuanben”and an analysis of errors produced by international learners of the Chinese language,is aimed at giving effective suggestions for better teaching of such words.In terms of ontological meanings,the three words can sometimes be used interchangeably,but cannot in other cases because of their semantic,grammatical,and pragmatic differences.Learners of Chinese are introduced to the word “yuanlai” at their beginning stage,but“benlai” and “yuanben” at the intermediate and advanced stages,which means much later.Due to a lack of systematic comparison of the three words,learners are prone to errors when using them.Therefore,an in-depth ontological analysis of “benlai”,“yuanlai” and “yuanben” and an errors analysis of them may be of benefit to better teaching of these words.Authentic examples of “benlai”,“yuanlai” and “yuanben” are extracted from the CCL corpus for an ontological analysis from semantic,grammatical,and pragmatic perspectives to investigate their similarities and differences.Semantically,the three words share the meaning of “initial” or “original”,differ in their semes of [+temporality ] [+continuity ] [+internal referent ] and [+specificity ].Grammatically,the three words can all serve as attribute and adverbial,and can be used in collocations in with subject-predicate or verbal phrases,but “benlai” cannot be used to modify a specific noun when it functions as an attributive,and can go together with both auxiliary verbs and modal particles.In a pragmatic sense,the three words can all be used to emphasize or introduce information focus,predicate or suggest some change or give personal comments.But at the same time,“benlai” and “yuanben” emphasize that the situation is certainly so when they are used to introduce information focus.When predicating or suggesting some change,“benlai” and “yuanben” can either mean that the situation has changed or will change,or that the predicted situation may be more customary or reasonable,while “yuanlai” generally means that the situation has already changed.By searching the HSK corpus,837 examples of using “benlai”,“yuanlai” and“yuanben” are collected.Errors in using them are classified into missing,erroneous addition,wrong ordering,and confusing use.An analysis of various types of errors is conducted.Causes of errors are analyzed in three aspects,i.e.,negative transfer of native language,over-generalization of the target language,the influence of teaching and teaching materials,and personal factors of the learners themselves.Finally,suggestions were given targeted at teachers,teaching materials,and learners.It is expected that some practical help may be provide for teaching Chinese synonyms to international students,so that teaching can be more effective while learners can acquire them more efficiently.