Study On Spatial Words In Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

Although the objective experience of Four Directions("Shang、Xia、Zuo、You") from Chinese to English are the same, but the spatial expressions of the two languages still have differences. We do semantic analysis on Chinese "Shang,Xia,Zuo,You", and then compare them to English because English is the most widely used vehicular language. In order to find out a new approach fit for teaching spatial words, we finally do the error analysis on the base of analysis we mentioned above.According to the Semantic Feature and Image Schema’s analysis for the Four Directions we find the translation between Chinese to English are one to multiple, as in English the spatial expressions are much more elaborate in assortment than Chinese, which we could differ from "whether the contact","whether the vertical","static or dynamic" etc; but Chinese expressions for "Shang、Xia、Zuo、You" are far more complicated than English in metaphorical meaning.Just because the expression of Chinese and English have some differences in direction, overseas students will likely to make some mistakes while they in the use of them. We through the retrieval of HSK dynamic composition corpus, and interviews to get the feedbacks from overseas students, we find out learner’s main mistakes are on comprehension and usage, but the total errors and mistakes in single entry are not much appeared. The example sentences which entail "Shang、Xia、Zuo、You","Shang-Xia"," Zuo-You" are10618in total, the wrong sentences are104in total. Among the single entries, we take the most popular "Shang" as example, which has8417examples in total, merely has88error sentences included, and accounts for1.04%of total example sentences. It seems the amount of errors is not that much. However, the extended meanings and errors in Chinese spatial words were barely found out in the corpus. We are not assuming the learners are successfully acquired, in the other way around, it may restricted by test materials and contents in the composition corpus, may as well as affected by learner’s learning strategy(such as avoidance strategy etc), the spatial expressions are not able to fully reflected in different levels of language environment. In order to further find out the possible ignore problems in corpus analysis, we conducted a small interview survey base on metaphorical ability. The result of the interview proves that the elementary, intermediate and higher students are more or less wrongly used basic and metaphorical meaning in spatial expressions. As for the understanding of basic meaning in spatial words, the elementary, intermediate and higher level students don’t seem to have too much trouble. On the metaphorical meaning aspect, if the given example sentences were provided, the three levels of students can be reasonable guess according to the context, but may a few early level students will guess wrong. General speaking, the students in early stage get a lesser sense of metaphorical meaning, the higher students are better. It also suggests that the understanding of metaphorical meaning is equally related with Chinese language level. Comparable to those similar metaphors with basic meaning the students are easy to understand. As for those extended and profound meanings, students are difficult to understand. The students in different three levels all have semantic and syntax errors in their expressions and the amount of errors is quite a lot. Students said, unless they have no choice, they usually chose to avoid. In case they must use, not only the order will go wrong, but also meaning is false. This is not only caused by student’s neglect or lack of use, but in the teaching process, due to the student’s avoidance strategy, teacher ignored these hidden problems, as well as not timely correcting their students.The reasons of errors are mainly caused by negative transfer of mother tongue, over-generalization, study strategy, cognitive factors and cultural transfer. This requires that teachers need to change the way of thinking in teaching process, and pay attention to these "hidden" problems, try to solve them with new methods.This paper based on performed culture theory to design some teaching segments of "Shang、Xia、 Zuo、You", in the hope that they will help students to understand the metaphors of spatial words and use them to successfully express themselves. This thesis aims to develop students’awareness of metaphors and the ability to understand them with the goal of improving students’overall communicative ability.