Error Analysis And Teaching Advice On Foreign Students’ Acquisition Of Chinese Potential Complement

The potential complement is a unique grammar structure in Chinese as well as a frequently used linguistic structure among Chinese users, arousing a high concern among the foreign learners. Due to the complex semantics and excessive restrictions of potential complements, understanding errors of this structure are widely common for new foreign students.This paper investigates the errors in the acquisition of potential complements that foreigners encountered during studying Chinese in five chapters.Chapter 1 comprises three sections, focusing on the analysis of the identities of potential complements. The first section introduces the background-and the objective of this study. The potential complement has an important significance in Chinese, but it also frustrates new foreign Chinese learners due to its complexity of application and the confusion with other linguistic structures. The second section discusses the main objects and approaches in this study. The objects cover the potential complement, the foreign learners of the potential complements and the syllabus and textbooks of Chinese. The approaches in this study include methods of induction, comparative analysis, sample survey and statistical analysis. The third section reviews the development of the potential complements. We analyze the definition and classification of the potential complement, the corresponding negative and interrogative forms of potential complements, and the relation among potential complements, resultant complements and directional complements. The comparisons among the potential complement, optative verbs and the state complements can be also found in this section.Chapter 2 analyzes the data from sample survey to the deviated acquisition of the potential complements from foreign learners. The survey is performed in the form of a questionnaire about the acquisition of the potential complements and 60 sample data are obtained from the foreign students studying in Anhui University and Xiamen University. Subsequently the sample data are analyzed statistically and are classified accordingly. Finally the origin of the acquisition errors is analyzed based on the statistical results.Chapter 3 investigates the syllabus and the literature materials in the current teaching activities. By comparing the guiding principles on the acquisition of potential complements in syllabus with the practical contents in the teaching materials, Chapter 3 states and analyzes the existed shortages in the current teaching materials used for the international Chinese education.Based on the study conducted above, Chapter 4 lists the potential suggestions proposed by the author in improving the teaching of potential complements. In addition, Chapter 4 also analyzes the feasible ways to optimize the teaching strategies in aspects of preliminary plans, teaching contents and assignments after class.Chapter 5 is the main concluding remarks for this thesis, summarizing the distinguished features and limited aspects in this study.