The West Han Punctuation Usage Contrasts And Teaching Advice

Punctuation marks are an indispensable part of the written language. With the help ofpunctuation, the articles can be read more smoothly and can be understood more easily. If anarticle does not have any of these punctuation marks, would be tedious for readers to understandit or even worst, the author’s ideas would be misunderstood. Unfortunately, after long years oflearning experience, I have come to realize that punctuation marks are ignored by most of theChinese language teachers. That is one of the mayor reasons why international students cannotpunctuate their work well and make many mistakes in writing.This thesis includes the following contents:The first chapter mainly presents the purpose and significance of this study such as theresearch methods used and the theoretical background. Taking into consideration importantcontrastive linguistics methods. We will describe and analyze Chinese-Spanish punctuationdifferences and similarities within a qualitative study. In addition, this chapter also presents thefunctions of punctuation.The second chapters contains a brief review of the evolution of Chinese-Spanish punctuationmarks, some achievements of other studies and the introduction of the recent used standards of“The People’s Republic of China National Standard of the Usage of Punctuation marks” and the“Real Academia Espa ola”(Royal Spanish Academy). Finally, a classification of each languagepunctuation marks with a comparative chart is provided.The third Chapter describes and analyzes the similarities and differences between11kindsof punctuation marks that have existing contrast characteristics on both languages. Taking intoaccount that Mario Vargas Llosa won the2010Nobel Prize in Literature, most of the exampleson this comparative part were extracted from his book Aunt Julia and the Writer. Theseexamples are presented in their Spanish and Chinese version, pointing out some of thedifferences between both languages’ punctuation marks. After the exhaustive contrastive study of the third chapter, the fourth chapter combines theprevious analysis with a survey directed to Spanish native speakers who answered with theiractual knowledge of Chinese punctuation to a short10questions questionary. Having theirvaluable feedback, four measures are proposed to increase the effectiveness of Chinesepunctuation teaching which are exposed as followed: Including punctuation into the Chinese as aforeign language teaching system; Being concerned about the new usage of punctuation, keepingflexibility at teaching; Highlight the distinctive characteristics of punctuation while teaching; andthe last but not least, Effective use of the native language can promote the teaching of Chinesepunctuation.As this thesis explains by itself, the main purposes of this study are to help the readersunderstand and let them know a little bit more about punctuation marks similarities anddifferences between Chinese and Spanish; to promote the effectiveness while teaching the actualChinese punctuation marks, and to help Spanish native speakers who learn Chinese how tomaster the use of various Chinese punctuation marks.This thesis profoundly hopes that can contribute to future comparative studies on Chinese-Spanish punctuation, and to increase the practice of Chinese punctuation teaching.