Error Analysis Of Foreign Students’ Discourse Cohesive Devices Based On Spoken Corpus

The research and error analysis of discourse cohesion in TCFL began in the 1980s and has made great progress so far.Overall,these researches are comprehensive,diverse in methods and rich in results.However,the author finds out that,on the one hand,there is not much discourse analysis on foreign students’ spoken language compared to their written language,which because the lack of oral corpus.On the other hand,most of the discourse cohesion analysis is focused on the study of senior students who are at the advanced level of Chinese or only analyze the cohesion devices of a certain level of students.It is especially hard to find relevant dis-chronic study of students’ acquisition of discourse cohesive devices in a longer period.Based on the above research background,the author recruited the transcripts of foreign students of different levels,which are primary,intermediate,advanced and cultural classes from the spoken corpus established by the Institute for international Students of Nanjing University.Learning from the former research achievements,this paper describes,contrasts and analyzes the three discourse cohesive devices,which are ellipsis,allegation and conjunctions in the spoken transcripts of foreign students according to the theory of discourse cohesion and the theory of error analysis.To solve the three major problems,the author:(1)drew the overall situation of different levels of students in acquiring these three cohesive devices;(2)studied and found that the error rates and error types of each level of students in the first half of the semester and after;(3)compared the error distribution and error rates of the four different levels of students in these three kinds of discourse cohesion in order to reveal the relationship between foreign students’ language level and the error distribution and rates of three cohesive devices,and finally provide the instructive and conductive suggestions to the TCFL teaching.In this paper,the author emphatically analyzed the transcripts of students who took both the midterm and final oral tests and with the statistical analysis software SPSS 22.0 to study the data,it turned out to be that:(1)basically the error numbers of three discourse cohesive devices decreased with the improvement of language level,except that the error numbers in the use of instructional pronouns and misuse and abuse of conjunctions of intermediate students are more than primary students;(2)foreign students’ error distribution and error rates of each language level displayed nearly the same from the final tests to the midterm tests in the using of ellipsis and allegation,though there were more errors found in the midterm tests compared to the final oral tests in using conjunctions;(3)there are different performances within each level of foreign students in using the three cohesive devices in their spoken language that ① the errors of using cohesive devices are mainly found out in the use of ellipsis of the subjects and pronouns and the lack of conjunctions in primary classes;② The errors in using three cohesive devices in intermediate classes mainly be seen by the increasing numbers of misused allegations and conjunctions and also the abuse of conjunctions;③the errors are mainly manifested in the complexity of misusing the allegations and conjunctions in advanced classes;④The students of the cultural classes are much more mature in using the three discourse cohesive devices than other lower levels of students,especially reflected in the smooth and natural use of ellipsis and allegations and the use of conjunctions has also been greatly improved.On the basis of this research,the author puts forward the following two suggestions for teaching practice that:1.make special markings and explanations of the discourse cohesive devices being used in the text;2.cultivate students’ awareness of using cohesive devices by designing exercises so that students can improve their oral expression ability.