The Study On The Thai Speaker's Acquisition Process Of Chinese Prepositions

The prepositions is a commonly used closed part of speech in Chinese and also a difficulty in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages.Strengthening the teaching of prepositions is very important.Currently there are just a few studies on the Thai speakers' acquisition of Chinese prepositions.However,these studies mostly focus on the comparison of prepositions between Chinese and Thai or focus on the errors that Thai speakers made.So this thesis chose to do the dynamic study on the Thai speakers' acquisition process of Chinese prepositions.This thesis counted and analyzed 31 commonly used prepositions in corpora of native Thai speakers.Based on the result this thesis find that with their advance in Chinese,the Thai speakers get a higher correct rate in choosing prepositions.They can use prepositions more flexibility and the frequency of preposition in their language is approaching the frequency of native Chinese speakers.And the same Characteristics and law are found in native English speakers as control group.These phenomenons shows that students' ability in using Chinese and Chinese preposition is in a developing state and appropriate teaching arrangement could accelerate the development of students' language skills.Through error analysis,it can be said that some problems such as Syntactic function of prepositional structure and Collocations of prepositions are quite difficult for foreign students,and the word meanings of prepositions are usually and easily overlooked.Thai speakers and English speakers also take different strategies to learn Chinese prepositions.Thai speakers tend to use prepositions which they are certain conservatively while English speakers are willing to use new word as trial and error.Besides,both Thai speakers and English speakers take the avoidance strategy such as using same sentence pattern and application of parallelism in different stages.So this thesis suggests that teachers should make targeted teaching plans so the classes can suit students' level better.As for specific teaching methods,effective Transformation training helps students use prepositions more flexibility.At the same time,teachers should not only emphasize teaching common grammar laws and structures about prepositions,but also need strengthen the training of comparing and collocation about prepositions while explain word meanings properly to students.Teachers could combine the word teaching and writing teaching and teach studentshow to choose Learning strategies and writing strategies which suit them better.