Error Analysis On Argumentative Discourse Cohesion Of Japanese Foreign Students With Advanced Level

The basic task of teaching Chinese as a second language is to help students develop the ability to use Chinese to communicate with others. This ability, known as discourse competence, concludes both using sentences and putting sentences into paragraphs and discourses. Argumentative discourse is very useful in our daily life and language tests. Learners use it to express their opinions to a certain topic. Correct cohesion could be useful to make opinions clear. However, Learners are not so strong in this aspect.We choose 63 discourses accounting for 25480 characters from HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus, which are written by Japanese students with advanced certificate. We use the classification of Huang Guowen to divide discourse cohesion into three types, i.e. grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion and logical cohesion. By analyzing the discourses of Japanese students according to these three types of cohesion, we find that there are ellipsis and reference errors in grammatical cohesion, ellipsis, misuse and redundance in lexical cohesion, ellipsis, misuse, redundance and disordering in logical cohesion.In terms of grammatical cohesion, the amount of ellipsis errors is more than that of reference errors. According to the ellipsis error, the "should have been omitted" type includes subject redundance, attribute redundance. According to the amount of each, subject redundance is more than attribute redundance. The "shouldn’t have been omitted" type is mainly included by subject ellipsis. Reference error includes the misuse of reference type and that of the specific reference words. The former is mainly made up of the misuse of noun reference and pronoun reference. The latter type of error mainly includes the incorrect use of the personal reference word and that of demonstrative reference.In terms of lexical cohesion, the amount of redundance error is more than that of misuse, while the ellipsis has the smallest number. Among the misuse errors, misuse among the same type is the majority, while the amount of the intertype misuse has a less number. In addition, The amount of error of words’ reappearance is more than the synonym’s reappearance, which is mainly result from the learners’ avoidance of the more difficult cohesion. The autonomy’s co-occurrence has the same amount as paralleling hyponym’s.In terms of logical cohesion, the amount of error of ellipsis and misuse are far more than that of redundance and disordering. Among ellipsis errors, complete omission and partial omission has the same amount, which probably results from learners’over pursuing of the simplicity of language. The misuse error includes the same type misuse and the different type misuse. Among which, the former is more than the latter. It is because advanced learners have mastered the order of Chinese sentence that the amount of disordering error is the least.Based on the division of the errors, we discovered the imbalance in the error of the argumentative discourse cohesion, which are made by Japanese foreign students with advanced level. In addition, we compare the result with that of Ma Yanhua in 2001 and try to analyze the reason.At last, We find out several reasons including the reason from second language, mother language, the learner as well as the teaching. Besides, we provide several suggestions to help improve the discourse competence of learners.