Empirical Research On Chinese N1+N2 Structure For Native English Speakers

This paper intends to deal with the noun-noun structure in English and Chinese from the perspective of providing the basis for accurate decoding, compare the noun-noun structures in English and Chinese and explore the effective teaching strategy to promote vocabulary teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language.The paper consists of four chapters:The first chapter is the introduction, which includes the two parts of raising the question and the significance of research on it, and the theory and method of research. This paper intends to explore the general rule followed by native English speakers during the process of acquisition of noun-noun structure in Chinese, explore difficult points and common mistakes in acquisition, seek to break through difficult points and seek the method for error correction to achieve the goal of efficient acquisition. The adopted study theory is:Theory of contrastive linguistics, language view of cognition-function tendency, theory of statistical linguistics and markedness theory; and the adopted research methods are:Document analysis method, sample survey method, interviewing method, inductive method and graphical method.The second chapter is about research on noun-noun structure, which consists of the three parts of noun-noun structure in Chinese, in English and of contrastive analysis of noun-noun structure of English and Chinese. In the study of noun-noun structure in Chinese, we refer to domestic literature review concerning research on noun-noun structure in Chinese, elaborate on definition of Chinese nouns and decode the noun-noun structure in Chinese from the perspective of sentence structure and semantics. In the study of noun-noun structure in English, we refer to literature review concerning research on noun-noun structure in English and decode the noun-noun structure in English from the perspective of sentence structure and semantics. In comparison between noun-noun structures in Chinese and English, we compare the semantics and word order of noun-noun structures in Chinese and English and make a full research on similarities and differences between the two structures theoretically.The third chapter is about the empirical research on native English speakers in learning noun-noun structure in Chinese, which includes questionnaire design and testing, analysis and discussion of data, and analysis from theoretical perspective, three parts in total. It is a kind of research on vocabulary depth to check native English speakers’ acquisition of noun-noun structure in Chinese through handing out the questionnaire survey for testing. The author uses the method of comparative analysis and error analysis to research the results of the test, explores the rules of difficult and easy acquisition and lays the foundation for improving teaching methods. There are 81 students being tested and they are all overseas students coming from Nanjing University and Nanjing Normal University. The questionnaire is designed to contain three major items. The first and the second are objective questions, which contain 45 small questions to test students’ ability of understanding and judgment on noun-noun structure; the third item is subjective and it contains 10 small questions to investigate students’ strategy in learning Chinese grammar. The third chapter focuses on analysis and discussion of data obtained from the questionnaire survey. We start from statistics of reliability and checking whether it is in normal distribution, make statistical analysis on whether there are differences among the four different kinds of noun-noun structure, between intermediate level and advanced level and between male and female in groups and use mother tongue migration theory and markedness theory to explain the rationality of existence of difference.The fourth chapter is about discussion and application of relevant problems, including the two parts of reasons for native English speakers to have difficulties in acquisition of noun-noun structure in Chinese, and textbook compilation and classroom teaching. Main reasons for formation of difficulties in acquisition are negative transfer of native language culture, markedness in word order and grammatical level. In order to reduce the difficulties students have during the teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language, we shall start from teaching material and teaching, adopt positive transfer of native language to teach, create situation in teaching, teach under the guidance of "task", and combine "intensive teaching" and "many practices" to promote students" acquisition.The feature of this paper lies in that we take accurate decoding of the linguistic phenomenon of noun-noun structure in Chinese and English as the basis, select a larger sample, start from negative and positive transfer of native language and the perspective of markedness, and conduct empirical research on native English speakers’ acquisition of noun-noun structure in Chinese. Up to now, articles concerning empirical research on this kind of larger sample haven’t appeared and we believe that this paper shall have practical significance for breaking through the difficult points during vocabulary teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language, which is also the possible innovation of this paper.