Empirical Research On Shi-Construction Teaching For Intermediate Level International Students Learning Chinese

‘To cause’ is an important semantic concept, which is ubiquitous in human languages. However, Shi-construction, one of causative sentences, is constantly not treated as the key of teaching. Most of the previous studies focused on ontology, with less attention paid to students’ acquisition. By analyzing the corpus-based statistics, it is found that relatively high is the error rate of the acquisition of shi-construction for intermediate level international students learning C hinese. Therefore, it is necessar y to investigate international students’ acquisition of shi-construction, and the research on shi-construction teaching methodology is of greater necessity.This thesis begins with a brief summary of shi-construction from the aspect of semantics,syntax and pragmatics. Based on the correct use of shi-construction, it collects data needed in the experiment. Then error analysis is done on the output of shi-construction in the previous test and the dynamic corpus of HSK writing tests,by which two types of errors( sentence pattern error and constituent error) and three reasons for making errors( inter- language error, generalization and the teaching of the target language rules, and incorrect guide of teaching material) are summarized. After that, it adopts explicit acceptance teaching method and explicit discovery teaching method respectively to conduct teaching experiment on two groups subjects, which shows that explicit discovery teaching method is more effective, whereas explicit acceptance teaching method is advantageous in keeping the teaching effectiveness. In the end, three suggestions are provided on shi-construction teaching based on the experiment results.