Study On The Rhetorical Question In Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

The rhetorical question is difficult point both for teachers and students in teaching Chinese as a second language. But for students abroad, the rhetorical question is a language point that must learn, as the rhetorical question are used constantly in daily communication. If students abroad fail to accurately catch message that transfer by the rhetorical question, communication can be interpreted.Based on previous research, this paper starts from analysis of sentence structure, semantics and pragmatic of the rhetorical question, and from the point of view that combines the ontology research and teaching Chinese as a second language, sum up two main types of the rhetorical question: typical rhetorical question and atypical rhetorical question. The former of significant grammar tag means, as main type of the rhetorical question, is the hot spot in current research. It is also the main content that students abroad should learn. The latter brings difficulties to teachers and students because of its unobvious tag means, and also become the blind spot of the research. This paper studies transferring of accent and intonation of the voice mark means, which is the only mean to identify atypical rhetorical question, and then discuss how to show its characteristics by transferring sentence stress, and tones such as high and low voices, strong or weak voices, fast or slow voices.In order to study the problems existing in teaching and learning in teaching Chinese as a second language, the author do a questionnaire survey to 72 students abroad in intermediate stage from Shandong University, Qingdao University and Qingdao Agriculture University, whose native background lie in Japan and Korea, Southeast of Asia, Europe and America, besides collecting relevant information about learning and teaching rhetorical question in practice. Based on different levels of students' identifying, understanding and using the rhetorical question, the questionnaires were designed four Questions for them, such as choosing, judgment, finding and complete dialogue (involving the common types of the rhetorical question in spoken Chinese), in order to reflect the multi-level of students' rhetorical question acquisition. Through the statistics and analysis, the students are found that it is very difficult to master the following types of the rhetorical question: yes or no question ( "not......?" "is" and "also"), question with choices, atypical question and specifiedquestion as "What /have sth / to do sth" (ask questions are not included). The author also studies how sex and cultural confluence affect the rhetorical question acquisition from the theory of second language acquisition and then do further theoretical discussion about the phenomenon of students abroad avoiding to use of the rhetorical question.There is a multilateral interactive relationship among the theoretical study of the rhetorical question, teaching Chinese as a second language curriculums and text books and teaching in the classroom. Theoretical research should be reflected in curriculums and text books, and curriculums and text books should guide the teaching; turn, classroom teaching will test the accuracy of theoretical research and reasonableness of the curriculums and text books, so as to promote the research and the development of curriculums and text books. Based on this, by reading several curriculums and many text books, the author conducted statistical analysis and found that the current curriculums and text books are out of the theoretical study and some other imperfect, which should be improved as soon as possible. And classroom teaching should play the leading role of teachers to enable students to correctly use the rhetorical question in daily communication as the final teaching goals by many flexible and effective teaching strategies and methods, rather than rigidly adhering to curriculums and text books.