A Study Of Directional Prepositions For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

In modern Chinese the directional prepositions are prepositional categories of spatial prepositions from the semantic perspective,all of which have similar meanings and usages,so the international students are likely to make varieties of mistakes when they use them to communicate with others.Therefore,we systematically study the directional prepositions with the hope of providing some help for students’ acquisition and teachers’ teaching.We analyzes in the beginning the grammatical features of directional prepositions.Directional prepositions,in terms of prepositional phrase structure,can be directly matched with locative nouns,pronouns or positional words.However,when quoting concrete nouns,only "Xiang(向)" can be used directly to express the meaning of direction while locative nouns must be added to other direction prepositions.In terms of syntactic functions,directional prepositions cannot directly act as syntactic components,and only the prepositional-objective phrases can assume syntactic functions.Besides,all directional prepositional phrases can serve as adverbials.And target-type direction prepositional phrases can also be used as complements,but the corresponding predicative verbs must be some monosyllabic verbs.Prepositional phrases composed of“Cong(从)","Xiang(向)" and"Wang(往)" can also act as attributives.The diversity of the meaning and usage of directional prepositions makes international students often mistaken for such prepositions.Having searched the biased corpus of all directional prepositions in the HSK dynamic composition corpora,we found that there are four mistypes of directional prepositions-mis-addition,mis-substitution,omission and out-of-order,among which the interlanguage error of mis-substitution is the most obvious.We conclude that the negative transference of learner’ s mother tongue,generalization of target language rules,mistaken learning attitudes of students and improper textbook notes for foreigners are the main reasons for the above errors.Basing on the syntactic and semantic features of modern Chinese directional prepositions,the types of errors made by foreign students,and the arrangement of the recurrence rates of prepositions and sentences in Developing Chinese and New Practical Chinese Textbooks,we propose the following suggestions:pay attention to the prepositional teaching phases,teach on the basis of comparative analysis,take a variety of exercises to train,help students sum up the key points and difficulties,etc.