Ukrainian Students' Acquisition Of Chinese Directional Complement Investigation And Teaching Advice

Chinese Directional Complements are among one of the most useful yet difficultgrammatical concepts to understand and use properly in Mandarin Chinese. Directionalcomplements tend to present a vast array of difficulties for foreign students of Chinese and thisholds true even among advanced students. In order to error on the side of caution, manystudents fall into the habit of tip-toeing around the use of directional complements or theysimply avoid them altogether through the substitution of a lower level language registry item.This can be seen to pose a problem, since this manner of use creates a highly unnatural and alsobroken flow in language. A great deal of students battle with this irksome problem during theiracquisition of Mandarin Chinese, and Ukrainian students are no exception. The grammaticalphenomenon of directional complements may in fact be one of the most challenging conceptswithin the Mandarin language for non-native speakers to both firmly grasp and also to use totheir advantage. The trajectory of this thesis is aimed at analyzing two disparate approaches forteaching Mandarin directional complements to non-native students (and specifically Ukrainianstudents) while providing suggestions in terms of overall comprehension of directionalcomplements.An initial analysis is presented in terms of non-native Chinese students being taughtdirectional complements. Two groups were given a questionnaire concerning specific issuesthat occur with non-native speakers in relation to their comprehension, successful use, andoverall mastery of directional complements. The first group consists of students who weretaught Mandarin in the Ukraine. The second group consists of Ukrainian students who largelylearned Mandarin while in China from native Chinese instructors. Both groups are consideredto have a high registry of Mandarin vocabulary, grammatical comprehension, and languagecontrol. The same applications of analysis were used for both groups throughout this study.The overall approach, here, is intended to provide non-native students of MandarinChinese with the means to improve their understanding of directional complements, for such agrammatical component plays a key role in fluency and contributes largely to native speakers’ability to both understand and converse with non-native speakers. Specifically, the thesisapproaches Mandarin language acquisition for natives of the Slavic languages (i.e.predominantly Ukrainian and Russian speakers). However, the research findings here may beapplicable for students of any language background. For native Slavic speakers, there is acomposite table of directional complements with annotations in Russian as well as a series ofexercises according to the most acute problems such speakers tend to have with directionalcomplements. The layout of the thesis consists of six chapters and is divided into the following topicalsegments:Chapter One: Introduction of directional complements within a teaching system. Thischapter pertains to information about both the objectives and scope of the research, researchmethods, and data sources used throughout this study.Chapter Two: Summary of the research papers and contributions made by Chinese andforeign linguists–including research on directional complements, research on teachingdirectional complements to foreign students, error analysis and correction, teaching methods,and research techniques.Chapter Three: Analysis of two separate Chinese textbooks. An evaluation is made ofcentral issues in relation to the books’ major flaws, and a section for possible improvements isalso provided.Chapter Four: Introduction of the questionnaire that was used for Ukrainian students.There is a description of the research principles and also responses from the questionnaire. Andlastly, an analysis of the results of both the research and the study is given.Chapter Five: Ameliorations on teaching methods and strategies for Ukrainian studentsare proposed. However, one caveat should be mentioned: these proposals for the advancementof language acquisition in terms of directional complements are by and large for studentsbetween an upper-intermediate level and advanced level of Mandarin Chinese.Chapter Six: Conclusion.