An Analyses On Common Chinese Prepositions’ Errors Of Intermediate And Advanced Level Serbian Students And Suggested Teaching Methods

In the process of learning Chinese as a second language students will make a lot of errors. Analysis of errors, identification of the reasons, and finding out teaching solutions which can reduce those errors, for foreign language teaching and research, as well as the research on the language itself, has a very important reference value.In the Chinese language words do not have conformational changes as it is the case in Indo-European languages. Therefore, in Chinese language many grammatical meanings depend on the functional words, thus the use and frequency of the functional verbs is very high.Prepositions as functional words, in teaching Chinese as a foreign language are the key points and as well one of the difficult aspects for students to master. In modern Chinese language there are limited numbers of prepositions, but they have a high usage and frequency. The usage of prepositions is also complicated and often difficult to comprehend; thusly, students will often make many mistakes.Therefore, in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language process, teaching students how to use prepositions correctly is one of the main teaching focuses. In this thesis, which for its main topic has "An error analyses on Common Chinese prepositions of intermediate and advanced level Serbian students and suggested teaching methods" under the guidance of the theory of interlanguage, analyzes the errors prepositions made by Serbian students, and according to the problems they have we have given some teaching suggestions. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the Introduction section. It describes the summary of the literature researched and used thus far on this topic, scope of this study, as well as its significance.In the second chapter, at first we made comparison with Cui Xi Liang’s research:"Characteristics of Chinese preposition acquisition and error analysis of European and American students". Furthermore, we made comparison of the frequency of prepositional usage of Serbian and European students in Chinese language. Prepositions that Serbian students use most often include the following:“在、跟、给、�'�、从、对、于、同、把、为、让、向”Because Cui Xi Liang in his research did not reflect on errors frequency for Serbian students, therefore we collected a language corpus, which comes from essays written by Serbian high school students and university students whose main branch is language study(from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Belgrade and the Foreign Language Middle School students’compositions). After analyzing corpus we found out that the prepositions with the highest error rate are following eight:’‘被、给、为、在、对、从、向、把”.Thus, it has been decided that the following eight prepositions will be the main subject of our examination and questionnaire. After the analysis of final results, and comparison with Cui Xi Liang’s study, we found that the rate of errors for Serbian students and European students in their use Chinese preposition errors was different. The second chapter focuses on error analysis and summarizes several common types; then describes and points out each type of error for each preposition. The errors are put into four main categories:omission, preposition redundancy, word order mistake and misuse.The third chapter explores and analyzes the causes of these common errors. We discussed the causes and pointed out the following reasons:interlingual, intralingual, strategy based errors and induced errors.In chapter four we proposed some teaching suggestions on the basis of the previously mentioned analysis. The suggestions are as follows:hierarchical teaching strategy, comparative teaching strategy, multi-angle teaching strategy and the proposals for teaching materials. Chapter five is conclusion part.In summary, we will deal with the following sub-categories:Firstly, summarize the types of preposition errors made by Serbian students, identify and analyze the causes and rules.Secondly, point out teaching suggestions in order to improve teaching effects and techniques which can help students to reduce the error rate and at the same time hope that it will contribute to the development of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.