An Analysis On Chinese Preposition Errors Made By Oversea Vietnamese Learners

The lack of conformational changes in strict sense determines the significance of Chinese functional words. Functional words have no real meaning, only representing some abstract grammatical roles, therefore, it is difficult for the oversea learners to master them. In addition to that, the flexible and multi-functional usage of them makes it a difficult point for Chinese-learning. Preposition is a key element in Chinese. During the process of Chinese-teaching to oversea Vietnamese students, we found that they make many errors in using Chinese prepositions. The present research in this field are relatively scarce, which in turn stimulates us to do some further studies on previous foundation. This essay makes a classification on the errors made by oversea Vietnamese learners into different catalogs and analyzed them by means of comparison and error-analysis under the guidance of basic principles on theories of interlanguage.We differentiated the collected huge amount of language corpus under the guidance of the basic principles of error analysis on Chinese grammar, discarded those accidental mistakes meanwhile sorted out the examples of general errors and made analysis on them. During the process of classifying, we categorized those with more commonness and less differences into one group and discussed those with more differences respectively. Starting from the point of foreigners-oriented Chinese teaching, we elaborated on those errors that Chinese native speakers master subconsciously while Vietnamese learners mistake frequently, and provided some concrete limitations to the commonly-used prepositions, hoping to improve Vietnamese students' applying ability. Additionally, we compared the Vietnamese prepositions with the Chinese prepositions, and made further comparison among those confusing Chinese prepositions and pointed out the situations of their usages.On the base of error-analysis, we discussed the causes of these errors and pointed out other factors besides the influence of mother tongue, such as the interference of the limited mastered target language, insufficient explanation of textbook made by teachers, and the difficulty level of the target language. Among these factors, insufficient explanation of textbook made by teachers is an element of great importance, which has not been given enough attention in previous researches. We proposed our suggestions on Chinese teaching as a second language on the basis the above-mentioned analysis. We hope this analysis can improve the teaching effects and raise the learning efficiency of Vietnamese learners as well as other learners from foreign countries.