Research On The Chinese Word Boundary Parsing Ability Of Intermediate And Advanced Foreign Students

There is no obvious word boundary to help readers identify the word in the written Chinese except the punctuation marks and other lexical forms. The relationship between Chinese characters and words is complicated. Chinese characters do not correspond absolutely to words. Whether the reader joins two or more conterminal but not related characters to make a single word or he separates a polysyllable into parts in a Chinese sentence, he will probably make the mistakes of Chinese Word Boundary Parsing. He will possibly apprehend the wrong semantic meaning of the sentence. The objective of the TCOSL reading is to train the reading abilities. One the abilities is to parse the Chinese word boundary. The teachers of TCOSL should pay attention to it. Based on the tests of reading, this research observes and studies countermeasure strategies and the errors of word boundary parsing in Chinese reading by intermediate and advanced foreign students. It also sums up the basic types of errors of word segmentation, analyses the causes, and makes some practical teaching suggestions from language and techniques.