| This paper aims to analyze and explore the effect of punctuation marks on Chinese reading comprehension through Chinese reading experiments for 36 HSK level 4 students and 31 HSK level 5 students from Nigeria.The main research methods we adopted are experimental method,observation method and interview method.According to the experiment results,and we got the conclusions by conducting one-way repeated measures Anova and doing the interviews.The conclusions are as follows:1.The punctuation marks affect the process of Chinese reading comprehension,readers were getting anxious when reading without punctuation marks so that they could not understand the meaning clearly.The pause function of punctuation marks is the most important,knowing where to pause is the key element to understand the texts.Punctuation marks don’t affect the result of students’ understanding.In most situations they scored higher in the reading with slash to replace the punctuation marks or the reading without punctuation marks,and even the ones with wrong punctuation marks sometimes,they did not do very well in the reading with correct punctuation marks.Besides,reading ability is measured based on many factors,like students ’Chinese level,their reading methods,and how questions and options are designed.2.Punctuation marks don’t affect the narrative reading and expositive reading in both types of close test and discourse reading,but it affects the argumentative discourse reading,and the wrong punctuation marks can mislead readers.Punctuation marks don’t affect the narrative and argumentative passage reading.3.Common slice will not affect students grasping the main meaning of the reading,it happens to be an proof that the pause function of punctuation marks is the most important use.According to the series of conclusions,the punctuation marks are necessary to reading,while we should think about the excessive grammaticalization of Chinese because of the effect of western punctuation marks,Chinese punctuation marks should be fit the characteristics of Chinese,and we should not decide how to use punctuation marks according to the grammatical structures,we need pay more attention to the subjectivity of Chinese.At the same time,it gives some suggestions on punctuation marks teaching.This part also narrates the shortcomings of this research and give some research suggestions,like do some researches of different nations,choose passage reading as test material,pay attention to the balance and diversity of the students,combine reading and writing and etc. |
