Foreign Students Interrogative System Acquisition Sequence Of Visits

Interrogative system is one of the most frequently used sentence patterns in the communication of foreign students and therefore great emphasis is placed on this pattern in the teaching of Chinese as a second language. A research on the acquisition order of interrogative system can help us decide the "inner framework" of learners and hence adopt corresponding teaching tactics and teaching approaches.First, by comparing and contrasting native speakers and foreign learners in using interrogative sentence patterns, we find that foreign learners betray different tendencies from native speakers.Based on the above research result, this paper attempts to investigate the acquisition order of the interrogative system by foreign students of three different levels (elementary, secondary and tertiary) of Chinese proficiency as well as their characteristics shown in this process by means of corpus and questionnaire. According to our research, elementary learners can acquire basic patterns of interrogative system; secondary learners gradually acquire those comparatively difficult patterns with certain pragmatic functions; and tertiary learners start to acquire the sentence patterns with a deviate of interrogative function and with complex pragmatic functions. Further, this paper makes a detailed explanation of the causes for the above-mentioned acquisition order from the following four aspects: frequency of use, extent of interrogation, difficulty of linguistic code and level of cognition. Last, this paper examines the handling of interrogative system by three teaching syllabuses and five textbooks used in teaching Chinese as a second language. By contrasting these findings and the acquisition order we have made out in the former section, this paper points out the weaknesses of some textbooks and proposes some constructional suggestions, which may be beneficial to teaching of Chinese as a second language as well as textbook compiling for it.