On Topic Sentences For Chinese International Education

Topic is one of the heated study focuses in contemporary linguistics. Meanwhile it is a difficult point for foreigners to acquire Chinese. Further research on whether the acquisition of Chinese topic sentences is affected by the transference of native language is needed.There are still some blanks in the research on Chinese topic sentences at the present time, not only on the aspect of Chinese language itself, but also in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. For Chinese itself, For the language itself, existing researches generally acknowledge syntactic and pragmatic importance. However, researches on the classification and generation of different topic sentences remain controversial. From the perspective of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, existing researches mainly focus on Chinese learners from countries of Britain, America, South Korea, Japan and so on. Few pay attention to learners from other countries.By analyzing the use of topic sentences in modern Chinese corpus and synthesizing existing studies, Chinese topic sentences can be divided into the following four types:topical topic sentences, left-set topic sentences, Chinese-constructed topic sentences and domain topic sentences. Each type can be sub-divided in detail depending on different pragmatic functions and grammatical characteristics. The data shows that Chinese topic sentences play the role of linking the preceding and the following, comparison, contrast, introduction and so on. The form of Chinese topic sentences is very flexible, among which Chinese-constructed topic sentences distribute most in Chinese Corpus.Spanish is a subject-prior language. By investigating and analyzing all the compositions of Chinese learners from Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Mexico, Spain, etc. in the corpus of HSK dynamic compositions, and by statistically classifying different types of topic sentences and studying the errors which appears on those compositions, we finally conclude that Spanish-speaking Chinese learners can acquire various types of Chinese topic sentences. But judging from the occurred partial errors, grammatical features of the Spanish itself will leave an impact of the acceptability of different types of topic sentences on Chinese learners. Thus, native language transference will influence second-language-learners to acquire the target language. Yet it is possible for them to acquire the structures that do not exist in their native language. In the case of the continuous input of the target language, learners can acquire grammatical points that are not activated in their own native language. From the research result of this dissertation we can point out that with the improvement of Chinese levels, the accuracy of employing different types of Chinese topic sentences for Spanish-speaking Chinese learners also rises gradually.Based on the corpus investigation, the author designs a questionnaire about topic sentences for Chinese learners in Chile in order to enhance the credibility of the survey data. The author also to do variance analysis of the investigation results. The analysis result shows that with the continuous improvement of their Chinese, the acceptability of Chinese topic sentences also improves. For those Chinese learners in Chile, the order of their native language is SOV, and the order of Topical Topic Sentence is SVO. Therefore, it indeed has a negative impact on the primary learner to some extent, but this effect is gradually disappearing with the improvement of Chinese level. Consistent with the investigation of corpus, the survey of questionnaires implies that learners differ in the acceptance of different types of Chinese topic sentences due to the influence of Spanish. The acceptability of left-set topic sentences ranks highest, followed by Chinese-constructed topic sentences, topical topic sentences and domain topic sentences successively.Existing textbooks of teaching Chinese as a foreign language in Spanish introduce types, characteristics and usage of Chinese Topic Sentences in different ways, but the degree of the introduction is not profound and comprehensive. In teaching practice, teachers should use different methods to teach different levels of learners. For example, for primary learners teachers can apply the way of dialogue practice, and for the advanced learners teachers can employ the method of writing.