Mandarin Syntactic Iconicity Study And Teaching Grammar For Foreigners

Several decades of teaching Chinese as a foreign language show that mandarin grammar has been being the most important part as well as the most difficult part in TCFL. And the most prominent difficulty of teaching mandarin grammar locates on these two aspects below:one is that it’s hard to explain for the teacher; the other is that it’s also hard to understand for the learners. And usally, the latter is the result of the former. Therefor, it becomes very important that how the teacher explains grammar phenomena in TCFL. Madarin syntactic iconicity study reveals the motivation of syntactic stucture which is profoundly rooted in the mind. So, this study provides the teachers much convenience and suggestion to rationally explain madarin grammar in TCFL. Through many years’work, lots of achievements have been acquired, which involve sequencing iconicity, distance iconicity, amount iconicity, symbol iconicity and so on. So, we believe that it is significant to explore how we put those achievements into practice in TCFL.This paper contains four parts:The first part is an introduction, in which we mainly introduce two basic aspects:one is how we understand language iconicity, the other is the long-time debate between language iconicity and language arbitrariness.In the second part we discuss mandarin syntactic iconicity on the basis of previous researches, including sequencing iconicity, distance iconicity, amount iconicity, symbol iconicity and so on.The third part is the study of teaching application of the achievements related above. Aiming at the difficulty of teaching mandarin grammar, we explore the application of mandarin iconicity principles in TCFL, with many examples. We also raise some suggestions in order to advance the current situation of grammar teaching in TCFL.The forth part is the conclusion..