Study On Developmental Process Of You-sentence By American And South Korean Students At Elementary And Intermediate Levels

Chinese You-sentence is a frequently-used sentence pattern with diverse semantics and sub-patterns. As an essential and difficult sentence, it is also higly used by foreign students. However, You-sentence lacks enough studies in the field of teaching Chinese as a second language. Most of the current studies are in single perspective, mainly analysing errors in written compositions from foreign students. There are only few studies focusing on oral Chinese, details of developmental process or comparison between students from different countries. In view of the inadequacies, this thesis collects longitudinal oral dialogues from four students (two Amerian and two South Korean) at elementary and intermediate levels, aiming to present the You-sentence’s distribution characteristics of different Chinese levels, describe the developmental process of You-sentence and analyse the similarities and differences of different students’ acquisitions. In this thesis, You-sentence is divided into T1 to T7 (T represents for structure).Firstly, elementary-level and intermediate-level students are analysed horizontally. Through calculations of accuracy, frequency of utilization and Mean Length of Utterance, it is revealed that compared with elementary-level students’ acquisition, there is a remarkable progress in the intermediate-level students’ acquisition in quantity, diversity, accuracy and complexity. Moreover, unbalanced development inside You-sentence always exists, no matter at which level the student is. The acquisition of T1 is the best and students at elementary level have already mastered T1 well. In the meantime, acquisitions of other You-sentence structures are not good. Other structures are significantly much harder than T1.Secondly, longitudinal analysis is used to explore the developmental process of You-sentence. By mostly using the moving min-max graph from Dynamic Systems Theory to divide the acquisition phases and classify them into certain developmental stage, the study indicates that the general trend in every student’s acquisition is rising. However, the detailed processes don’t keep rising linearly, always having alternant phases of variability and stability. Staged progress of language always appears after the phase of variability. Students at elementary level share the same speed of acquisition while students at intermediate level don’t. Acquisition of intermediate-level students is affected greatly by individual factors.Combining the horizontal and longitudinal analyses, seven structures of You-sentence can be classified into three difficulty levels when accuracy, frequency of utilization and developmental stage are all taken into consideration. T1 is at the lowest level,which means T1 is the easiest structure of You-sentence. T2 and T7 are at the middle level with certain difficulty. T3, T4, T5 and T6 are at the highest level, which means they are the hardest structures for foreign students to master.Thirdly, this thesis probes into the similarities and differences of American and South Korean students’acquisitions. Through calculations of accuracy, frequency of utilization and Mean Length of Utterance, it is found that American students are better in terms of quantity, diversity and complexity while South Korean students act better in terms of accuracy. What’s more, language backgrounds are proved to have greater influence in accuracy than in fluency of utilization. American and South Korean students share same commonly used structures:T1, T2 and T7. However, students from the two countries have huge disagreement on accuracy. They have completely different sort orders of accuracy. When it comes to specific structures, it is clear that American students have better acquisitions of T2, T3, T4 and T5 while South Korean students have better acquisition of T1.To conclude, it is believed that You-sentence will definitely improve when students reach to a higher level of Chinese. This kind of sentence appears to be easy as a whole but has great diversity inside. According to difficulty, seven structures of You-sentence can be divided into three levels. Developmental process of acquisition is non-linear, full of alternant phases of variability and stability. Students from different language backgrounds behave differently while using You-sentence and need targeted teaching schedule. When teaching You-sentence to foreign students, teachers should pay attention to the differences of individuals, structures of You-sentence, phases of developmental process and language backgrounds. Teaching plan must be in accordance with the specific situation in order to bring great teaching effects.