| Using various punctuation marks correctly is not easy for native Chinese speakers,let alone Indonesian learners of Chinese.We found sentence like this in Indonesian students’essays,"*因为他们很懒。做什么事就做最方便的方法。"A comma should be used to connect two small sentences,but a period is used here,resulting in a"period misplaces comma errors".We believe that the main reason for this error is that Indonesian students do not understand that punctuation not only indicates pause and tone,but also can be used for cohesion and coherence,reflecting the semantic-logical relations within the discourse.After a corpus search and literature research,we found that period and comma are most frequently used in Indonesian students’ Chinese compositions,and the error rate is also high.Therefore,in this paper,we will study the Indonesian students’ errors of period and comma from the perspective of discourse cohesion,analyze the reasons for their errors,and propose corresponding teaching suggestions in order to help Indonesian students standardize the use of period and comma in Chinese and master the whole system of Chinese punctuation more effectively.First,we selected 170 compositions of Indonesian students from the intermediary language corpus of Sun Yat-sen University,with more than 70,000 words.By marking and counting the sentence and comma errors in the corpus,we found that the Indonesian students had more period errors than comma errors.In terms of the types of errors,the period errors can be divided into "period misplaces comma" and "redundant period",and the comma errors can be divided into "comma misplaces period" "comma omission" and "comma redundancy".In terms of the discourse factors associated with the errors,the comma substitution and comma omission errors were influenced by three discourse factors,namely,the topic chain,the chapter linking component,and other factors,while the comma substitution errors was mainly influenced by the topic chain,and the comma redundancy and comma redundancy errors were influenced by other factors.Second,we compiled 170 essays of more than 70,000 words from non-Indonesian students from five different native language backgrounds and compared Indonesian and non-Indonesian students’ errors in learning period and comma from two perspectives: bias types and bias-related discourse factors.We found that the errors rate of Indonesian students was higher than that of non-Indonesian students,but the errors of both Indonesian and non-Indonesian students was dominated by periods instead of commas and comma omission,and both were mainly influenced by topic chains and chapter linking components,except that comma omission and comma redundancy were relatively more serious among Indonesian students.Then,we describe in depth the various manifestations of Indonesian students’ period and comma errors in conjunction with example sentences.On this basis,we explored the deeper reasons for Indonesian students’ period and comma errors.We believe that Indonesian students’ failure to accurately understand the semantic logic of Chinese sentences is the main reason for the substitution of a period for a comma and a comma for a period.At first,Indonesian students tended to define Chinese sentences from a grammatical point of view,so they would put a period where a comma should be used.Later on,they gradually realized the semantic logic of Chinese sentences and put the comma where the period should be.In addition,the neutral style of the textbook also has an influence on the production of period misplaces comma errors.In contrast,comma omission,period redundancy and comma redundancy errors arise because they do not grasp the relationship between phonological and semantic-logical principles.In addition,teachers’ inattention also affects the production of errors.Accordingly,we believe that we should pay attention to the function of punctuation in the selection of teaching materials and in the implementation of teaching practice.For example,in order to make students understand the relationship between pauses and the semantic logic of Chinese texts,teachers can select texts with story and plot and use punctuation in a standard way for students to read aloud,so that students can strengthen their understanding of the function of punctuation in the context of the text.This can help students master the use of punctuation more accurately and thus better improve their written expression and reading comprehension skills.Of course,the effectiveness of our findings has yet to be further tested due to practical conditions. |
