An Analysis Of Chinese Canadian Students' Errors Of Chinese Interrogative Sentences

Interrogative sentence,as one of several major Chinese basic sentence patterns,it has very high of using frequency in daily communication and it occupies a very important position in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Domestic and foreign scholars have achieved success in the ontological study of interrogative sentence in Chinese but they have been relatively weak in the research and study on the teaching of Chinese interrogative sentence.Moreover,Chinese interrogative sentence is a hot and difficult topic in teaching Chinese as a foreign language so it should be highly valued by scholars and for this reason,this study should be taken into high account.This paper investigates the acquisition and the use of interrogative sentences in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language,with a close look to the question of its teaching methods.This paper has Chinese descent students of 8th and 9th grade in Canada Calgary Chinese school as its subjects and uses questionnaire surveys and data analysis to investigate three kinds of Chinese interrogative sentence acquisition,including the Yes-No questions,the choose question and the rhetorical question.In order to compare tests effectively,in addition to the students of Chinese descent,this test also selected 102 non-Chinese students.Questionnaires are identical for both categories of students.By comparing and doing statistics between Chinese descent and non-Chinese students we can find out that,due to the influence of positive transfer of mother tongue,the two categories of students make less error when using choice questions in Chinese interrogative sentence.On the contrary,while learning Chinese Yes-No questions under the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue,the errors are more frequent.At the same time,the analysis of the questionnaire found out that even if Chinese descent students don't speak Chinese in the family and study Chinese at beginner levels just like non-Chinese students,they are more excellent than non-Chinese students in learning Chinese,and this is due to subtle recognition of Chinese culture.In terms of learning Chinese interrogative sentence in Calgary Chinese schools,most of the errors are due to the over-generalization of target language,teaching misleading,attitude,learning environment and so on.For students of Chinese descent in the process of acquisition of Chinese interrogative sentences,good study habits and learning abilities level affect learning of Chinese interrogative sentence.From analyzing the errors in the acquisition of Chinese interrogative sentence rules from Calgary Chinese school,this paper puts forward some strategies and suggestions for overseas Chinese Teaching from the investigation analysis,for example,teaching students in accordance with their attitude,improving students' learning interest,paying attention to different interrogative structure comparison and so on.Moreover,we can find common grounds between the syntactic features of English and Chinese interrogative sentence,and so we can stimulate students' interest in learning Chinese and effectively improve the effect of teaching Chinese overseas.Through the investigation and analysis students of Chinese descent in Calgary Chinese school individual case,this research could contribute to the researches in this field and also help Chinese descent students learning Chinese to have some common features and use it as a reference and explore a teaching approach with a certain validity and reliability.Therefore,this research will be of great help in the use and in the actual process of teaching Chinese interrogative sentences overseas.To conclude,this paper tries to go through the investigation and analysis of Chinese interrogative sentence and explore some of its rules.This is not only conducive to the teaching Chinese as a foreign language but will also add some additions to the studies on the interrogative sentences.