Teaching Research On The Preposition Structure Of "About" And "For" Topic Sentences For Foreign Students

Topic sentences are getting familiar to us since Yuen ren Chao introduced the concept of"topic" into China.The paper aims to study the function and significance of the topic makers of "about" and "for" topic sentences.As "about" and "for" are function words,they have the common function as other prepositions.While "about" and "for' are also the marks of topic sentences,thus,they has their particular meaning.The paper is divided into three parts:the basic study of "about" and "for",the conclusion of the learning of "about" and "for" by foreign students,and the teaching analysis of "about" and "for".The first part is to analyze the syntactic distribution and functional meaning of the two prepositions acting as the topic markers.From the perspective of syntactic distribution,the topic sentences led by "X ?"can be concluded as "X ? T,C"("T" and "C" refers to the topic and comment).As for the combination of the prepositions,the "X ?" can be combined with words and phrases.As for the pragmatic function,The structure "X ?" is indispensable,it can highlight,intensify,and make comparisons among topics and connect paragraphs.Based on the content of foreign language teaching,the paper also refers to the comparison between"about" and "for" and the comparative analysis of topic sentences between Chinese and English.Besides,the paper adopts two new perspectives("cognitive psychology" and"comparative culturology")to study the Chinese and English topic sentences.The cognitive psychology can explain the strategy chosen by people studying the preposition topic sentences to explore the blind spot in language cognition.The comparative culturology emphasizes the comparison between Chinese and foreign culture,so it can be concluded the methods selected by foreign people studying the topics and comments to compose sentences and paragraphs.The second part is to study the learning condition of the "about" and "for" of foreign students,as well as the attitude of them towards the teaching of "about" and "for".The author took the advantage of the internship opportunity for one year to collect the biased errors of the foreign students in Yangzhou University and Yangzhou Industrial Vocational and Technical College,and combined with the error examples of HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus to classify the nationalities of the people making those errors.After completing the classification,the author analyzes the types and causes of the biased errors which is based on traditional analysis approaches,and tries to conclude the connections between the error types and the nationalities of people making the errors.In the last part(the teaching analysis of "about" and "for"),according to the class observation,the teacher interview and observation notes,and teaching survey,we in order to seek for the problems of teacher and students in class.Considering these problems and causes of the biased errors,the corresponding teaching experience will be provided,to decrease the chance of the errors.