Empirical Research On Foreign Students' Performance Of Recognize Chinese Word Boundaries In Reading Chinese Sentences

Making mistakes in recognizing word boundaries in Chinese reading and having to pause between every character when reading Chinese texts are two quite common phenomena that occur amongst foreign students.This has caused a lot of troubles in their reading.Therefore,it is important to study word boundaries segmentation performance of foreign students when they read Chinese texts.Currently,there is not much research on Chinese word boundaries segmentation,so not much information on the subject can be found at this stage.This thesis intends to start an initial discussion on foreign students' performance of recognizing Chinese word boundaries in reading Chinese sentences.After analyzing and summarizing related theses and previous research,this thesis tries to study the following questions:what attitudes do foreign students hold when reading traditional Chinese texts--which are written character by character without space between words;and how do foreign students who have learnt Chinese for a long time perform on word boundaries segmentation tests when reading Chinese sentences?What are the reasons for these results and how can the above issues be solved?This introduction summarizes related studies on Chinese words segmentation.Due to there not being enough words boundaries in Chinese text,the definition of"word",as of now,has no solitary meaning.One's sense of "word" differs between ordinary people and linguisticians.In the centerpiece of this problem,foreign students are the object of study,this thesis follows a broadened concept of "word",one that more ordinary people hold."Words" used in this thesis includes words and phrases,which includes Chinese idioms,closed-in construction,proper noun,special adjective phrases,verb-object construction and verb-complement structure.Word boundaries segmentation is a term originated from computational linguistics,and now is applied to Chinese text reading.It is mainly for foreign students,and aims to improve their reading ability."Words" is used as a segmentation unit in this thesis,to describe foreign students' means of recognizing words or phrases while reading Chinese texts.In addition,compared with other related research,this thesis makes the following changes on the design of its experiments:(1)Participants have all at least passed HSK Level 4.In order to ensure the quality of the experiments,the participants were divided into two groups according to the results of their HSK 5 vocabulary tests.(2)All experimental examples were chosen from eight past HSK Level 5 exams in 2012 and 2013.Then we did a survey on foreign students' attitudes to reading traditional Chinese texts in Chapter 2.This is a direct way to learn about what influences foreign students'have when reading traditional Chinese texts.Results show that most participants agree that wrong word boundaries segmentation may interfere in their reading,but texts with space between words may help their reading and understanding.With the improvement of foreign students' Chinese ability,this influences their ability to be able to recognize Chinese word boundaries segmentation.Advanced level participants have for the most part said they haven't had issues recognizing word boundaries segmentation in their Chinese readings.Word boundaries segmentation hasn't been shown to be valued in their present Chinese classes.Chapter 3 is an investigation of the word boundaries segmentation performance of foreign students in reading 30 Chinese sentences.We could discover their ability of recognizing word boundaries segmentation and reading by analyzing their performance on cutting traditional Chinese texts word by word.We analyzed the data from two aspects.Firstly,we compared the numbers of words they cut with the results of a standardized test.The comparison results showed that participants in the higher level group had a larger reading unit;they tend to read word by word,even phrase by phrase.However,participants in the lower level group had a smaller reading unit;they were inclined to read the text character by character,especially in difficult readings.Secondly,by statistical data of their error rates,generally we found participants in the higher level group behaved better than participants in the lower group.Looking at the simple sentences,there shown a significant difference between these two groups.Analyzing the harder sentences,these two groups had almost the same error rates(around 80 to 100 percent).We discussed the causes of these errors in Chapter 4.There were eight main reasons:interference by familiar words,interference by homophone and polyphone,interference by proper noun and idiom,lack of morpheme and collocation knowledge,small vocabulary,lack of cultural knowledge,week in grammatical structure,and lack of understanding the rhythm of Chinese language.After isolating these main problems,we put forward some teaching suggestions and methods for the sake of trying to solve the above issues.For our final part,we created a summary for our thesis:1)It takes time for foreign students to get used to traditional Chinese text,but troubles caused by wrong word boundaries segmentation in Chinese reading will always exist.2)Students who have a large vocabulary have thought they will not be confused by word boundaries segmentation,but this issue still may occur for them.Although they have almost mastered all the characters and words in sentence they read,they may still make mistakes caused by lack of Chinese language knowledge,lack of cultural knowledge,or lack of understanding the rhythm of Chinese language.