A Study On Written Language Chunk Use Of Chinese Learners In Multiple Native Language Backgrounds

Studies in foreign languages prove that chunk plays an important role in L1 and L2,and writing is one of the important skills in second language acquisition.In the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(TCFL),there is still much room for exploration on the study of chunks in written language.Whether the use of chunks can be used as a measure standard of learners' writing proficiency?What is the relationship between the number of chunk use and the composition scores?How to make use of the research findings at home and abroad to help students learn and master Chinese better are all worth being studied.Based on the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpora,we selected 50 Japanese learners'and 50 European and American learners' compositions as the research materials.At the same time,50 Chinese native speakers were invited to write the same topic compositions for comparative analysis at the chunk level.This study attempts to clarify the similarities and differences of chunk use among the European and American group,the Japanese group,and the Chinese group,as well as the relationship between the chunk use and learners'writing proficiency.The results of the study indicate that the number of syntactic-level chunks used by the three language groups is greater than the number of chunks used at the discourse level.At the syntactic level,the use of phrase chunks is greater than the number of sentence-based chunks.In the use of phrase chunks,the three groups used regular collocations most,and proper nouns and abbreviations least.According to the results of One-Way ANOVA Test,we can find some significant differences of the number of chunk use among three language groups.Judging from the total number of chunk use,there is a significant difference in the number of chunk use between Chinese group and by the Chinese team and European and American group.Concerning the chunk use of two main types,significant differences are found among three language groups in their use of syntactic-level chunks.In the use of syntactic-level chunks,significant differences are found in the use of fixed strings,regular collocations,proper nouns,idiom and sentence-based chunks.In the use of discourse level chunks,significant difference is only found in the use of parenthesis among three language groups.In terms of the relationship between chunk use and writing proficiency,we obtained the following results through a series of correlation analysis:In Japanese group,there is moderate correlation between the number of chunk use and writing proficiency.While in European and American group,low correlation was found between chunk use and writing proficiency.The syntactic-level chunk use of the Japanese group was moderately correlated with the composition scores,and the discourse-level chunk use had low correlation with composition scores.In the European and American group,both syntactic-level and discourse-level use of chunk had low correlations with composition scores.Besides,this study also analyzed the error of learner's chunk use.We discussed some important phenomena and rules of chunks which were used by learners in multiple linguistic backgrounds in written language.On this basis,this study discussed some of the inspiration that TCFL can gain.Based on the results above,we propose the following suggestions for the teaching of Chinese learners with multiple linguistic backgrounds.First,enhanced chunk awareness and emphasize the overall characteristics of chunks,especially the top three chunks in error analysis:phrase structures,regular collocations and fixed strings.Second,encourage students to learn high-frequency chunks.Teachers should summarize the common used chunks in Chinese and according to the learners' current learning materials,sum up a batch of high-frequency chunks to facilitate learners' learning and memory.Third,fully consider the learner's native language background and guide students to discover similarities and differences between Chinese culture and student's native language culture,so as to make better use of relevant chunks,such as folk adages.Fourth,to make full use of the traditional Chinese teaching methods.Teachers can use the traditional methods of memory and recitation to arrange assignments and encourage learners to practice more and more.Fifth,sort chunks in terms of the level difficulty.According to the level of students,different levels of chunks are taught in a targeted manner.Sixth,make full use of corpus resources to assist teaching of Chinese writing.