Error Analysis Of Directional Complements By Foreign Students With Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Proficiency

The study of complements in Chinese has been a hot but difficult topic, with directional complement the priority among priorities. Directional complement is difficult due to its various kinds of meanings, complicated structures and unstable combining forms. Besides, complement is not a regular part in other languages, which increases the difficulty for foreign students to learn. Directional complement has drawn linguists’ significant attention for a long time, and plentiful researches in this field have gained abundant accomplishments since last century. In this century, the study on directional complement has become popular in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. It has obtained great attention that foreign students usually have high error rates using directional complement. In addition, the teaching and research of directional complement have made a significant breakthrough, which has yielded gratifying fruits. Present research work, however, has mainly focused on foreign students from different countries and comparative studies. Literature about common errors made by foreign students at a same level is not enough yet. Therefore, this paper will enlarge subjects into foreign students with different cultural backgrounds who have already taken intermediate and advanced Chinese classes in order to find reasons causing errors and their common characteristics, which is used to apply to teaching better.On the basis of directional complements ontology study, study results among teaching Chinese as a foreign language and error theory, this paper attempts to make statistic analysis on the written language corpus of foreign students with intermediate and advanced language level from Jinan University as well as the questionnaire of the foreign students with intermediate and advanced level from Institute for International Students College of Nanjing University. It aims to generalize the high frequency error among the foreign students with intermediate and advanced level, summarize the reasons behind them and propose the corresponding teaching strategies so as to contribute to the relevant study.This paper consists of five chapters as follows.Chapter one is the introduction, which introduces the reasons for choosing this topic, study significance, study objects, study method and train of thought and put forwards author’s view of point in this research area.Chapter two is the research overview in which 22 directional verbs are the study objects. In this part, the paper reviews directional complements ontology study and the develop history of the teaching Chinese as a second language, describes the current conditions in the relevant research area and summarizes the previous research findings. This part is divided into two parts:ontology study, ontology and deviation study. It summarizes the significant works on the directional complements on ontology study and lists some relevant works as well as analyzes the findings on error study.Chapter three is the error analysis on the basis of corpus. In this part,22 directional verbs are the key words. Medium and advanced level are the limitation for choosing the subjects. We collected 3168 relevant sentences from written corpus of Jinan University with 389 sentences of errors which amount to 12.28% error rate. On the basis of the above analysis, the paper classifies four error types of the foreign students with omitting, mistaken adding, mistaken substitute and wrong sequence, calculates the percentage for each of the four types respectively, analyzes the typical error phenomenon, reaches conclusion and summarizes the most frequently errors.Chapter four is the error analysis on the basis of questionnaire. On the corpus analysis, the author designs the questionnaire for directional complements on the basis of the previous research findings and investigates among foreign students with medium and advanced levels in Institute for International Students College of Nanjing University. After collecting the valid questionnaires, the author calculates the error percentage and accuracy, and makes individual analysis on the high frequency questions. When analyzing the questions, we sort out the items with more errors, summaries the general errors of the foreign students, combines the descriptive and explanative methods, throws light on the reasons and conditions for the usages of different directional verbs, distinguishes the easily mistaken parts, and makes statements on the background of the relevant research. In addition, this paper focus on different performances of the foreign students with different language levels when facing different questions, and explores the parts that they perform weakly.Chapter five is the teaching suggestion. We work out the main error forms of the directional complements for foreign students and explore the reasons behind them. Therefore, this paper proposes some practical teaching suggestions on the problems during the previous analysis and attempts to contribute to directional complements teaching during teaching Chinese as a foreign language.