A Tentative Study On The Application Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese Discourses By Advanced English-native Learners Of Chinese

The ultimate purpose of overseas students'learning Chinese is to acquire the ability of (?)mmunication in that language. It has been discovered in our teaching practice however that ven learners of the advanced level can hardly produce a discourse without any awkwardness or bsurdity, although there's almost nothing wrong with their word-choosing or grammar. This ppears to suggest that in TCFL,we should treat the language as an organic system instead of (?)e simple collection of a bunch of sentences. More attention should be distributed to the (?)aching of discourse cohesion which can thus make students'communication in Chinese more (?)hesive and coherent.In order to get an overall understanding of the students'application of cohesive devices in (?)xt and find out their problems, we collect passages from the HSK monitor corpus of (?)mpositions for study and hope to reach some points which could be of some help to the TCFL. o make our research more specific, the compositions we collect are from the English-native (?)aminees who have got the A, B or C level certificate of the HSK(Advanced).In other words, (?)e research objects of this study are English-native learners of Chinese, advanced level.In this paper, we first review the cohesive theories at home and abroad. Such theories have een widely used in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Most of these researches >cus on students'incorrect use of single cohesive device, while limited quantitative researches ave been done to the overall application of cohesive devices by English-native learners of hinese.Based on the theories put forward by forerunners,a careful study has been done to the 62 (?)mpositions to check the usage of reference, ellipsis and conjunction in those texts. From the ,250 correct uses collected, we get a comprehensive and more objective view of the application f the three cohesive devices by English-native learners of Chinese. According to our statistics, e suggest that more attention should be paid to the teaching of conjunction. The 209 incorrect ses of cohesive devices in the linguistic data have also been carefully classified and analyzed, (?)hile giving some specific teaching suggestions, we find out that the advanced English-native arners of Chinese show some characteristics which are different from that of the basic and itermediate level learners, the characteristics which are also different from what we have (?)pected. The language of English is generally considered as form-based, while Chinese (?)eaning-focused. But, advanced English-native learners seem to be merely bothered by the egative transfer from the mother tongue. Instead of making mistakes of overusing cohesive evices in their Chinese discourses, they appear to be over meaning-focused. Such ver-generalization is believed in this paper to be caused by the dual affection of the economical (?)inciple of language use by human being and the imbalanced focus of our teaching. To solve all (?)ese problems and better improve the TCSL, some suggestions are offered from the perspective f the teacher and the learner.