The Research On Error Analysis Of Chinese Phrase "Zai+Location" Acquired By English Speaking Students

For international students learning Chinese, function words are definitely a sore point. Although prepositions are small in number, they acted as one of the most important kinds of function words. Among all the prepositions, Chinese character Zai, which means at, in, among, or others in English, is learned in an early stage, but the Chinese intermediate level students still make mistakes in practice.The writer intends to analyze students’errors on Zai followed by location with the help of Views of grammar at three levels, Inter language Theory and Error Analyzing Theory, and based on the results of questionnaire survey and the statistical analysis of corpus. Through the statistics, the writer sees that there are basically five main causes for Zai errors, which are negative transfer of mother tongue, over-generalization of the target language, The interfere of cultural factors, avoidance, and too little contents on grammar and pragmatics in text books and reference books. By studying specific error examples from the corpus, the writer finds that causes for syntactic errors are varied, and causes for the error in one example varies, too.Based on the above analysis, the writer develops several suggestions for teaching, learning and compiling textbooks and reference books on Zai followed by location. Firstly, teachers should customize teaching approaches for students based on systematic teaching and sense of language teaching, focus on language’s communicative function, and give advice on students’learning Strategies. Secondly, students should have the awareness to overcome the negative transfer of native language, take the initiative to practice thinking in a Chinese way, and strengthen the learning of prepositions as well as its learning Strategies. Finally, textbook compilers should pay more attention to the systematic grammar while focusing on the communicative function.