An Analysis Of Chinese Preposition Errors Made By Thai Learners

This essay makes an analysis on Chinese preposition errors made by Thai learners by means of error-analysis under the guidance of the theories of interlanguage.This essay uses questionaire and language corpus to collect errors. We process the errors gathered from JianHua Chinese-Public School Thailand and use a Chinese interlanguage corpus based on the foreign students of Chinese Language and Culture of Jinan University.Before investigation and study, the author through observation, interview and organize the composition made by Thai learners to collect some errors about Chinese prepositions and then selected six Chinese prepositions ( zai, cong, gen, gei, dui, wei )as the scope of the study accoding to the frequency of the three types of vocabulary of HSK A, B and C. On this basis, the author designed the questionaire to investigate the use of this six Chinese prepositions of the students of Jianhua Chinese-Public School Thailand.At the same time, we use a Chinese interlanguage corpus based on the foreign students of Chinese Language and Culture of Jinan University to collect some errors about the six prepositions made by Thai learners. Totally we collect errors 341 cases.This essay analyzes and summarizes the materials according to the article of Lu Jianji (1994). Under the generalization from the errors materials which were collected from Thai learners, first we find the misusage of the six prepositions whose frequency is highest is "zai", the second one is "cong"; Secondly the errors of preposition made by Thai learners could be classified as preposition absence, preposition redundancy, preposition misplacement and preposition replacement. Whithin these four types, preposition replacement appear most, the second one is preposition misplacement; Finally, among all the preposition redundancy errors, preposition "zai" is the most frequent errors made by Thai learners, totally up to 88.5%.The reason that Thai learners make that kind of errors is mostly because of language transfer and teaching mateials, and based on these reasons, some advices of teaching methods have been given.