A Tentative Study On The Application Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese Discourses By English Learners Of The Chinese Language

The purpose of teaching Chinese as a foreign language is to develop students' ability to communicate in Chinese. And it has been discovered in our teaching practice that learners whose native language is English will have no great difficulty in vocabulary and grammar learning when they have reached the intermediate level of Chinese. Their problem mainly lies in the application of cohesive devices in text. By comparing English with Chinese, we have found that the cohesion in English text is form-based, but the cohesion in Chinese text is meaning-focused. Besides, of the various cohesive devices, the biggest difference in Chinese and English is the frequency of applying the conjunction device. This paper, based on the text cohesive theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan (1976, 1985), aims to explore the different cohesive devices in the two languages (the conjunction device in particular) and analyze how English learners of Chinese use such cohesive devices in Chinese text. This paper also seeks to find out whether their use of cohesive devices is affected by their mother tongue. And it is hoped that our tentative suggestions will be of some help to our teaching and research.This paper is divided into six parts.The first chapter, a brief introduction, offers some basic information about the writing of this paper, which involves the research objects of the paper (English learners of Chinese who have been studying Chinese in East China Normal University for at least one year), the source of linguistic materials, as well as the research methods and research purpose, etc.The second chapter is the literature review of the cohesive theories at home and abroad. Such theories have been widely use in the teaching of English as a foreign language and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. This paper mainly focuses on the cohesive theories adopted in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language since limited research has been done in this area..The third chapter defines such terms as text, cohesion, and conjunction, illustrates the cohesive devices in English and Chinese, and analyzes the differences and similarities of applying cohesive devices in Chinese and English text.The fourth chapter focuses on the correct use of cohesive devices by analyzing the three sub-categories of elaboration,extension and enhancement. According to our statistics, the learners' uses of such cohesive devices are quite unbalanced. More discussions have been given to the causes of such imbalance.The fifth chapter focuses on the incorrect use of cohesive devices. It has been found out that negative transfer from the mother tongue plays a major role in the choice of individual words rather than the number and frequency of using cohesive devices. And the distribution of such mistakes is also imbalanced.In the sixth chapter, some suggestions and recommendations are given on textbooks, teacher's roles and the better use of research results.Finally, this paper also has its own limitations: the analysis of the linguistic material may not be sufficient and the explanation of the incorrect use of cohesive devices may not be accurate. Comment and suggestions on this paper will be highly appreciated.