A Study Of French Students’ Acquisition Of Chinese Yes-No Questions And Their Answers

The Chinese Yes-No questions have attracted wide attention since the 1980s with the gradually increasing number of researches. Existing research has also been conducted in the field of the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, which has yielded fruitful results. Some conclusions have been made regarding the Chinese learners of English-speaking students. However, there is few research in terms of French students’ acquisition of Chinese Yes-No Questions and their answers, which is taken by this thesis as a key point of departure to investigate the errors made by French students and further explore the causes leading to these errors.This thesis adopts four research methods:comparative method, questionnaire-based method, corpus analysis method and analytic statistics method. The comparative method has been availed in analyzing the similarities and differences between Chinese and French Yes-No questions and their answers on the basis of comparative linguistics. The aim of this comparative study is to provide a concrete linguistic research foundation for the rest of the chapters. Based on the questionnaire-based method, a survey has been made to inquire into the acquisition of Chinese Yes-No Questions and their answers by French students in Nanjing University. Corpus analysis method is used to inspect Chinese Yes-No questions acquired by French students in written and oral corpuses. This thesis further studies the statistics resulted from the questionnaire and the corpus, then points out the quantity distribution of various sub-categories of Chinese Yes-No questions and their answers.This thesis is composed of six parts:The Introduction explains the aim, background, significance, theoretical basis and methodology of this thesis. Chapter 1 is the comparison study of Yes-No questions in Chinese and French. It points out the similarities and differences in Yes-No questions in both languages by comparing the structure, classification and function, in the hope of rationalizing the related research. Chapter 2 provides a questionnaire which aims to research Yes-No questions and their answers by French students. The questionnaire covers the sub-categories of Chinese Yes-No questions, and also examines the French students’ understanding of the answers in Chinese Yes-No questions. Based on the previous analysis, Chapter 3 includes two parts. The first part investigates the acquisition of Chinese Yes-No questions and their answers by French students, which is represented in the written corpus, with the purpose of gaining some understanding of the linguistic features in terms of this grammatical point. The second part examines a dialogue corpus provided by the author with the view of investigating the French Students’ acquisition of Chinese Yes-No questions and their answers in Authentic context. When indicating the attainments made by French students’ acquiring Chinese Yes-No questions and their answers in Chapter 4, the thesis discusses the cognitive, pragmatic as well as cultural reasons that lead to their attainments. In the Conclusion, the author summarizes the achievements, research values and theoretical implications.This thesis finds that French students are able to understand and answer interrogatives with marker "Ba" and high-interrogatives with marker "Ma" correctly, while for the understanding and answering of those more complex sentence patterns, especially negative Yes-No questions, the error rates are comparatively high, which indicates that French students have much difficulty in acquiring Chinese Yes-No questions in the aspects of understanding as well as linguistic output. The features of French students’ acquisition shows that the attainment of French students demonstrates various characteristics when the type of Yes-No questions changes; in the meantime, the fact that French students are under constant influence of the cognitive thinking mode of their mother tongue and cultural background is most obvious in the process when they are using negative Yes-No questions and tag questions.It is hoped that the research findings of this thesis would help to acquire a general picture of the French students’ acquisition of Chinese Yes-No Questions and their answers, and offer some advice for the modes of teaching Chinese, compilation of textbooks, and teaching environment for the acquisition of French students.