The Error Analysis On The Chinese Punctuation Marks Used By American Students

With the rapid development of modern science and technology, information exchange is becoming more frequent, and people are more concerned about the written language. Written language is based on the spoken language, and it breaks the limitation of time and space among people when they are speaking, imparting information and sharing thoughts and feelings. It also accelerates the speed of information transmission and expands the scope of information dissemination. On the whole, written language mend the pace of social development.Written language is a symbol system which is used to "see", including words and punctuation. Punctuation, as a necessary part of written language, plays an important role in every languages, not only in Chinese and English. It can be used to express the tone and the pause in a sentence or a paragraph, at the same time, distinguish grammar structure and semantic level. If the punctuation is used improperly, it may cause ambiguity, misunderstanding and even a farce. Therefore, we can not neglect the proper using of punctuation in writing. Teaching practice also shows that a mount of punctuation mistakes are found in foreign student’s writing.Currently, domestic studies on the comprehensive analysis of foreign students, especially those English-speaking American students, using Chinese punctuation are rarely less. English and Chinese punctuation, at some extent, are similar, but there are also some differences between them. This paper, based on the People’s Republic of China National Standard Punctuation Usage(GB/T15834-2011), investigated118American students’ original writing materials and matched marked materials from HSK corpus, and summarized two types of errors, one is about function usage, the other is about form usage. At the end, the thesis also tried to analyze the causes of these errors, and make some suggestions on improving the skills of punctuation teaching to foreign students.