Italian Students’ Learning Of Chinese Confusable Words: Errors Analysis And Teaching Strategies

Confusion of words with close meaning is a problem very difficult to overcomefor Italian students of Chinese language. At the present time, academic works aboutconfusable words specifically referring to students of different nationalities are veryfew. Therefore, in this paper I deal with the difficulties Italian students encounterwhile learning Chinese confusable words analyze their more common mistakes andsuggest some solution for the teaching of these words. After reading the availableconfusable words-related materials and a long time-taking survey based on threequestionnaires and many interview with students and professours, I defined the rangeof my research choosing38of the Chinese terms (divided in18groups) which aremore frequently confused by Italian students. Based on theories of comparativeanalysis and foreign language students’error analysis, I classified the mistakes in theusage of the words I have chosen in cathegories and tried to identify the causes oftheir errors. Finally, I proposed a set of teaching strategies to help the studentsovercome this kind of obstacle.This work is divided into four parts. The introduction includes: an explanation ofthe background and the significance of the topic choice; a review of the sources; anexposition of the contents and the methods of my research. The second part describesin detail the structure of the questionnaires and the content of the interview andoutlines the results of the survey. In the third chapter there are the classification of themistakes based on error analysis theory and the study of the causes based oncomparative analysis. The influence of Italian as mother tongue is a key problem inthe learning of Chinese vocabulary, thus it is the main concern of this study. Idistinguished various circumstances and several ways the students are misleaded bytheir mother language, e.g.: several Chinese words can be translated into the sameItalian words; different Chinese words can be translated in different but inter-relatedItalian words; no Italian words are available to translate a certain Chinese term. Then Ialso examine other causes of the errors. The fourth chapter is the most important ofthis paper: basing myself on the causes of the errors previously analyzed, I putforward a complete set of teaching strategies addressed both to the Italian and the Chinese teachers. Four steps of the teaching of confusable words are outlined: first, apreliminary discussion of the differences between confusable words; second, acomprehensive analysis of these differences; third, summarization; at last, review andconsolidation. Then I specifically discuss the strategies to make students understandthe differences between the words. Among these, I propose: constant use of typicalsentences; paying attention to words combinations; use of morpheme analysis;emphasizing the teaching of grammar cathegories of words; taking advantage of somesimilarity between the two languages; memorizing comparative examples; using thecultural features of some morphemes and words; helping memorization throughmultisensory matching exercises and so on. The objective of such strategies andteaching methods is to solve practical problems in teaching of Chinese vocabulary.In the conclusions, I summarize the several kinds of difficulties Italian studentshave to deal with when faced with Chinese confusable words, the typologies of theirmistakes and the possible solutions. In the end, I also expose the main weaknesses andshortcomings of my work.