A Study On The Comparison And Teaching Of Existential Sentences In Chinese And Thai

Chinese and Thai,both belonging to Sino-Tibetan family,enjoy a number of similarities in grammar.For example,both languages have the basic syntactic structure:S+V+O(subject-predicate-object),with no literal changes of form but employing word order and function words to express grammatical meanings.Similar as such,there are still more differences between the two languages,such as the ways of expressing existence.Among Thai students of Chinese,many of them often resort to their Thai way to express existence when learning and using the existential sentences in Chinese language,the differences of which they often lose sight of in expressing existence in the two languages,thus resulting in various transfer errors.In Chinese,there is a hierarchy of difficulties in the existential sentences,which exerts some degrees of difficulty for Thai students in learning and utilizing such sentences.From the perspectives of syntax,semantics and pragmatics,the existential sentences in Chinese language are a headache for them in their learning this kind of expression,bringing about their incapability of expressing themselves in Chinese more accurately and native-like,and accordingly distancing them from reaching their goals of learning this foreign language.Thus,in order to help them acquire their goals and improve their ability to better and more accurately use existential sentences in Chinese,this dissertation,by way of contrastive analysis of the differences and similarities in this respect,a questionnaire survey and transfer-error analysis,will conduct a thorough study of transfer-error phenomenon,the types and the causes of their transfer errors,followed by a design of the teaching techniques and effective teaching strategies for more fruitful teaching and learning of existential sentences in Chinese language.This dissertation is composed of the following seven chapters.Chapter 1 An introduction to the origin,significance,framework and novelties of this research.Chapter 2 Characteristics and Types of existential sentences in Chinese and Thai.Chapter 3 Various Expressions of Existential Sentences in Chinese and Thai;A Contrastive Analysis of the differences and similarities of the syntactic structures of existential sentences of the two languages staring with each of the three parts of the existential sentence in Chinese,namely,A,B,and C were used as a model to compare with parts of sentences in Thai.Then,different types of existential sentence structures in Chinese and Thai were compared.Chapter 4 A comparison of existential sentences of the two languages from semantic and pragmatic perspective.Chapter 5 Statistical results from Thai students' responses to the questionnaire on existential sentence uses in Chinese.Errors made by Thai students when studying existential sentences in Chinese were analyzed and categorized which resulted in five types of errors,namely,word order errors,word use errors,word addition errors,word missing,and word use avoiding.Causes of the errors were also analyzed.Chapter 6 Reducing errors on existential sentences in Chinese made by Thai students.This chapter reports the teaching design and its experiment of existential sentences in Chinese on third year Chinese language major students of Udon Thani Rajabhat University.The successful teaching methods and strategies were concluded.Chapter 7 Summary of all chapters and limitations of the present study.It is highly expected that this dissertation will be able to benefit students and Chinese teachers regarding teaching existential sentences in Chinese.