The Willing Class Can Analyze The Verb Bias

This paper, from the perspective of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages and based on the summation of the findings of previous researches, makes a study of the lexical meanings of the four Chinese volitional modal verbs: yao “be going to”, xiang “want”, gan “dare” and ken “be willling”. This research involves the ontological study of modal verbs and subcategorized volitioanl modal verbsCorpuses of errors of those four modal verbs are selected from the HSK Corpus containing dynamic compositions written by international students whose mother tongue is English. Four types of errors are identified and summarized: omission, wrong additon, wrong reference and wrong word order. The reasons for error formation are analyzed, including errors caused by cross-linguistic differences in lexical meanings, errors by cross-linguistic differences in grammatical rules, errors by inappropriate use of near-synonyms and errors by misapplication of learning strategy.This paper proposes some effective teaching strategies including strengthening the ontological study of modal verbs and the contrastive study between English and Chinese, strengthening the generalization of grammatical rules, specifying the conditons for the use of words, mastering learners' learning strategy and communication strategy, with a view to deepening relevant theories and improving teaching methodology in the teaching of Chinese to speakers of other languages.