Time Words In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Time words are the words that express time. According to theirpragmatic functions, the time words can be divided into the group of wordswhich express a point in time, for example: calendar year, month, day;morning, noon, afternoon, evening; hour, quarter, minute, etc. They alsocan be divided into the group of words which express a period of time,for example:“five years”,“three days”;“from... till...”,etc.The author discovers that in the process of teaching Chinese as aforeign language, both teachers and students often do not pay enoughattention to the simple time words. As for the pragmatic function of thetime words, the importance of it in the process of teaching Chinese asa foreign language is very big. In this thesis, the research of the timewords included a detailed study of the distribution of the time wordsin the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, analysis oftime words errors made by some foreign students, identification of thecauses of errors, suggestion of learning strategies to the foreignstudents and teaching strategies to teachers.The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter introducesthe research background, the topic and its significance, theoretical baseand main research methods.The content of the second chapter includes the review of scientificliterature on time words and their usage. In the third chapter is carried out a research of the time wordsselected from each level of vocabulary of “Chinese words and Chinesecharacters syllabus”.In the forth chapter is given the analysis of distribution of thetime words based on Intensive Reading and Spoken Chinese teachingmaterials.The fifth chapter includes the selection of the time words to forma study sample, the random selection of the time words errors from “HSKdynamic composition corpus”, the analysis of types of those errors andtheir causes.In the sixth chapter the author suggests learning strategies to thestudents and teaching strategies to the teachers based on the analysisof the causes of errors made in the fifth chapter.The conclusion part includes a summary of the text of the thesisand suggests the points which were not completely studied and the placeswhich require further research.