Error Analysis Of Primary Chinese Vocabulary Acquisition Among International Students

At present,the strength of Chinese education is rising.China is attracting more and more international students.Under this circumstance,many Chinese universities begin to develop international students' education in accordance with their own advantages.As a discipline of Chinese course,Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language plays a significant role in international students' education.Vocabulary teaching is the foundation and key issue for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.But for the international students who learn Chinese on the primary stage,different types of lexical errors occur in their lexical usage.Their knowledge of vocabulary is restricted.The primary lexical errors are becoming an urgent problem that Chinese teachers must cope with.From the foreign students' testing papers of Basic Chinese,the author classifies the categories of primary lexical errors that appear in students' testing papers with the theories of interlanguage and error analysis.Three angles are employed for analyzing the errors,namely,cognitive perspective,microscopic perspective of lexical semantics and macroscopic perspective of pragmatics.Meanwhile,the author finds out the underlying causes of the errors,which can provide guidance for primary vocabulary teaching.The subjects of this thesis are 133 Pakistani students from 2016 batch in Yangtze University.Quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied to investigate and analyze the primary lexical errors,aiming to explore their distribution and frequency.In the data analysis,data and examples are from the 133 students' testing papers of the mid-term and final examinations.In addition,the questionnaire is adopted to further illustrate the results from the errors in testing papers.The questionnaire mainly concentrates on students' attitudes towards vocabulary learning,sensitivity to lexical errors and difficulties in vocabulary learning.By utilizing the theory of error analysis,the author tries to study the lexical errors in students' testing papers,to classify the categories of the errors and to figure out the frequency of these errors.The author also makes attempts to discover the causes of the errors.Through the analysis,the author wants to seek answers to these questions: 1)Are there any difficulties for foreign learners in studying Chinese vocabulary? If so,what are the main difficulties for them? 2)What types of errors are often made by foreign language beginners in learning Chinese vocabulary? 3)What's the causes for these frequent lexical errors made by foreign language beginners?According to the analysis of the samples and investigation of the questionnaire,the difficulties faced by foreign students are closely related to the three angles of analysis of the lexical errors.Cognition aspects,semantics and pragmatics are the main difficulties for them.Through the analysis,the errors are generally divided into four categories: errors related to word formation,errors related to semantics,errors related to cultural additional meaning and error related to improvised vocabulary.Errors related to word formation occur more often than other categories.Moreover,errors related to word formation can be further divided into four types: synonymous words with different morpheme,synonymous words with common morpheme,monosyllable and dissyllable with common morpheme and homophones.The main causes of errors are inter-lingual transfer,overgeneralization of the target language rules,fossilization of interlanguage,semantics and pragmatics of Chinese vocabulary.Based on the results of research and the current practical teaching,the author probes into the implications in order to present some useful pedagogical suggestions.Four teaching principles and four methods for primary lexical teaching are proposed by the author.The four teaching principles are demonstrated as the principle of handling errors positively,the principle of practicability,the principle of combining words' formation and meaning and the principle of review.The four teaching methods are concluded as teaching with synchronic approach and diachronic approach,increasing students' Chinese language input,teaching vocabulary in linguistic context and analyzing the underlying cultural background of words.Hopefully,the results of the study can provide some guidance for primary lexical teaching.