Research On Foreign Students' Usage Of Chinese Special Related Rhetorical Question

Chinese rhetorical question is a commonly used in modern Chinese sentences, and has a rich form of expression and expressive pragmatic functions. But some studies show that, it's not very easy for foreign students to fully grasp and flexibility use Chinese rhetorical questions in communication. Different types of the rhetorical question cause different difficulties for foreign students. Specially related rhetorical questions is one of the most difficult ones to master, the reason is that foreign students often mistake these kind of rhetorical questions with the question sentences, both in recognition and understanding. Therefore, this essay used the corpus analysis, questionnaires investigating, interviews and other methods, in order to find out the situation of foreign students mastering and apply specially related rhetorical questions, and also the key point and difficulties in teaching special related rhetorical question.Because the current studies on specially related rhetorical questions' pragmatic function has not yet reached a unanimous conclusion, this essay summarized the 6 kinds of commonly used pragmatic functions of specially related rhetorical questions after reviewing related previous studies and gathering the statistics from modern Chinese corpus. At the same time, this essay also summed up 12 kinds of commonly used sentence patterns.On this basis, this essay examined foreign students'usage of these 6 pragmatic functions and 12 typical sentence patterns by the means of questionnaire investigation and statistics analysis. The survey shows that, overall, foreign students have no difficulties in understanding the pragmatic functions and typical sentence patterns of the special related rhetorical question. The main reason that causes misunderstanding of is the virtual degree of the interrogative pronouns in the special related rhetorical question. However, there is a big obstacle for foreign students in using the special related rhetorical question, as the foreign students tend to avoid using it or make mistakes in using typical sentence patterns.In order to analyze the reason of this situation, this essay went over the current syllabus and textbooks in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, and also interviewed the foreign students and their teachers. Then found out the reason is the teaching of the special related rhetorical question's pragmatic functions and sentence patterns in current syllabus and textbooks is not very systematical or well-targeted. The introductions of the pragmatic functions are quite simple, and the special related rhetorical question used in the texts don't cover all the 6 pragmatic functions; meanwhile, there're no introduction of the special related rhetorical question's sentence patterns in syllabus or textbooks. These cause the consequence that foreign students can understand using question words to express rhetorical questions, but always make mistakes when using it. The exercises in the textbooks are usually just mechanical drills, did not emphasize the importance of context.At last, this essay proposed two suggestions on the special related rhetorical question teaching:one is to teach with context; the other is to emphasize the teaching of sentence patterns. Hope this will be beneficial to the later research.