Studies On The Annotation Of Characters And Words In Chinese Reading Course Published By BLCUP

As the rapid growing of Chinese economy, the number of people learning Chinese rises quickly and more and more people are attracted to the career of teaching Chinese to the speakers of other languages. The importance of characters and words in the process of language learning is self-evident. Annotating Chinese characters and words in English is a method adopted by many foreign students-oriented Chinese textbooks; however there are some annotation errors in such kind of textbooks published in China, which is a phenomenon worthy of great attention. A series of textbooks named Chinese Reading Course, which are published by Beijing Language and Culture University Press and widely used in Chinese teaching to the spearkers of other languages, are chosen as the object of this thesis. Character and word annotation errors in old edition book1and book2, word annotation errors in old edition book3, and character and word annotation errors in revised edition book1and book2are taken into consideration. As for the annotation errors of Chinese characters, they are concluded as the following three ones: substituting the meaning of characters by that of words, the meaning of characters being not the one it has in the word, and giving no annotation or oversimple annotation. As for the annotation errors of Chinese words, they are concluded into tree ones:the source words and target words are not equivalent in semantic meaning, grammatical meaning and pragmatical meaning. Seven strategies are put forward and they are:①give the meaning of characters and words at the same time.②do not use the word whose conceptual meaning is different from that of the word annotated.③do not use polysemous word to annotate alone.④pay attention to the equivalence of connotation and lexical field between words annotating words annotated.⑤tag the part of speech.⑥annotate words in view of their context.⑦use bilingual annotation in books for students with intermediate or high Chinese level. At the end of this thesis, questionnaires are designed to test the effectiveness of these seven strategies which are supposed to be useful in improving annotations in foreign students-oriented Chinese textbooks.