Research On Acquisition Of Chinese Qualitative Adjectives For Primary Stage Learners Whose Mother Tongue Or Main Communicative Language Is English

This article is based on the analysis of different morph syntactic performance where Chinese and English qualitative adjective act as predicate and attribute. Applying survey method to examine the foreign students whose mother tongue or main communicative language is English, aiming at solve the problems they got when they are learning Chinese, studying the types and causes of the error and proposing recommendation and improvement for teaching.This article mainly investigates two problems in the acquisition of Chinese qualitative adjectives, the first is how well the native speakers of English master the feature of the “N+A” structure in which Chinese qualitative adjectives are taken as predicate when it represents a comparative meaning; the second is how well they grasp the rules which regulate whether “de” should be added between the attribute and the head word or not while learning the “A+N” structure in which qualitative adjectives are taken as attribute. This paper takes the “red” and “high”and “good”, and other 13 commonly used adjectives as the research objects and designs a questionnaire, aiming at investigating students of primary Chinese level whose mother tongue is English in College of International Culture Exchange of Hebei Normal University and the College of intensive Chinese Training of Beijing Language and Culture University.Through the investigation, the article sums up the errors appearing in this part of knowledge, and analyzes the sources of these errors from four aspects: inter-language negative transfer, inter-language negative transfer, learning environment, and learning strategy.(1) The negative transfer of inter-language. The structure of “N+A”in English is different from Chinese; its adjective is postpositive attribute and has no meaning of comparison. Furthermore, when English adjectives are taken as predicates expressing comparative meaning, they will change. For the problem of the acquisition of whether “de” should be added or not when Chinese adjectives are taken as attributes, the negative transfer of inter-language includes: related items in target language are more complex than those in native language; the relevant distinction in target language does not exist in native language; the standard of classification of Chinese differs from English customarily; English does not use the same structure to express the concept that Chinese “A+N” structure conveys.(2) The negative transfer of inter-language. The students primarily learn the sentences with an obvious mark like “bi”, “bu ru”(less than) and “hen”(very) to express comparative meaning, and they master them very well, so later when they counter the condition that qualitative adjectives are taken as predicates without any marks, they are confused. In addition, when it comes to the issue whether “de” should be added or not when qualitative adjectives are taken as attributes, what the students first learn are the conditions that the structural auxiliary “de” is a sign of forming attributes and “de” should be added after state adjectives. In the nature of adjectives as attributive on the issue, first of all to learn is the “structural auxiliary word ‘de’ is a sign of attributive form”, and state adjectives plus situation, so when they counter the situation that “de” should not be added which is later learned, they also feel puzzled.(3) Learning environment. The arrangement of this portion of knowledge in their teaching materials is incomplete, unclear, even lacks of this part, and with very few corresponding exercises Additionally, the degree of teachers attention for this part is not enough and learners living and learning environment is relatively closed and they have only a little contact with Chinese people. All of these factors cause negative effects on their learning process.(4) Learning strategies. Students can easily have the emotions of fear, anxiety, irritability, and other negative feelings in the process of learning. All of them make the learners decrease their learning enthusiasm will lead to disadvantageous influence on their learning of Chinese.Contraposing these causes, this thesis puts forward the following strategies to adjust and improve the current situation:(1) In the aspect of compiling of Chinese teaching materials, we need to enhance the design of the explanation of grammar and the exercises after class, to increase the frequency of occurrence of qualitative adjectives.(2) In the aspect of teachers, they require improving their own level of expertise, and keep noticing that the language they use should be easily understood, avoiding employing the words that learners have never met or technical terms. Teachers also should teach students in accordance of their aptitude, and adopt varieties of teaching methods to enhance the teaching effect. Besides, there is room for improvement in exercises, too.(3) In the aspect of learning strategies, students have to adjust their learning strategies positively, while overcoming the emotions of fear and being adept in employing various kinds of methods to learn. For example: chatting with Chinese friends as much as possible, surfing on the internet, looking up dictionaries, looking for help from teachers and others and so on to learn better of Chinese qualitative adjectives.