Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Time Position Words By Foreign Students

As a special kind of characters in modern Chinese,characters of locality are most frequently used to express space,time and quantity.Characters capable of denoting both locality and time are a kind of characters which can express timeliness,and their grammatical nature and semantic functions are more complicated.Characters denoting time are often used with event nouns,with which foreign students studying Chinese are prone to make biases in the process of acquisition.At home and abroad,although abundant and fruitful researches have been made on time locus,still not enough attention has been paid to time orientation in the field of Chinese as a second language acquisition.Based on test questionnaires supplemented with relevant corpus,and by comparing the statistics made from test results,the present study attempts to investigate how foreign students studying Chinese learn and master time locus in general,to generate several types of errors they likely to make,to analyze the causes related to these errors,and to put forward some corresponding teaching countermeasures in particular.This paper consists of five parts.The first part is an introduction to the research object,the significance of the topic,the previous research reviews,the research theories,the method and the source of corpus.The second part is the comparison of time orientation characters,which are compared in the four groups,including �before,after�,�before and after�,�before and after�,and �middle and period�.Other languages compared are mainly English,Korean and Japanese.By comparison,we find similarities and differences between Chinese time orientations and time orientations in other languages.The third part is the study of the acquisition of Chinese time orientations,which is based on questionnaires,the statistical biases and types of bias.The fourth part is an analysis of the causes of the errors in learning Chinese time orientations,mainly from linguistic factors,cognitive factors and other factors.The fifth part is some suggested teaching countermeasures for Chinese characters denoting orientation and time from the perspective of teaching strategies and learning strategies.The sixth part is the conclusion which rounds up the discussion and raises some questions for further studies.