A Study On Topic Sharing Of International Students:Based On Theory Of NT Structure

Text teaching plays an important role in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Understanding the Chinese parataxis mechanism is helpful to improve the ability of discourse coherence of international students.In the theory of NT structure,the parataxis of Chinese is revealed by the process of constructing the sharing relationship between the clauses.Guided by the NT structure theory,this paper explores the topic sharing phenomenon in the compositions by international students from HSK corpus.Three factors namely Chinese proficiency,language type and genres of writing are investigated perspectively.Specific steps are as follows.:First,the current existing methods aiming at the research questions are reviewed followed by the introduction of NT structure theory and corpus tagging method;Second,NT structure theory is revised so as to be adaptive to Chinese interlanguage and the compositions are tagged in accordance to the newly-revised rule;Third,data statistics and difference analysis are carried out based on the tagged results.The results show that:(1)The usage of NT structure by foreign students has nothing to do with the language type,but is related to their proficiency and genres of writing.The foreign students in the high-level group use the NT structure more frequently with a lower error rate,and the overall use of the NT structure is better than that of the low level group,although the foreign students in the low-level group also have the sense of component sharing;Narrative discourse has a higher degree of Naming dominance,and the role of text function is slightly stronger than that of argumentative discourse.However,both of them are significantly lower than that of Chinese native speakers,and frequent Naming conversion is a common problem in the discourse of overseas students.In addition,the error rate of narrative genre is higher than argumentation genre,which is caused by its event.(2)The difficulty level difference of the foreign students in constructing the component sharing relationship is manifested by sharing of the same syntactic position→new branch model produced by object of a ver→naming is a modifier in the original clause≈new branch model produced by object of a preposition→new branch topic sentences produced by pivotal sentence;(3)The most common types of errors of foreign students are the naming redundancy and naming loss.With the improvement of foreign students’ Chinese proficiency,the number of naming redundancy decreases significantly,but the error of naming loss has not been significantly improved.The reason may be that the factors that cause naming redundancy errors are relatively fixed,which is not difficult for the students to amend.Nevertheless,the factors that cause the naming loss errors are relatively diverse,which involve the parataxis mechanism of Chinese.So it is difficult for foreign students to correct the errors without relevant training.Clarifying the NT structure is the premise of analyzing other structures of the text.The research of this paper shows the phenomenon of topic sharing in the text of foreign students,which can not only promote the coherence of the discourse of foreign students according to the types of errors and difficulty levels but also Facilitate the writing teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.On this basis,further studies on the dynamic process of constructing logical relations in foreign students’texts and their understanding of Chinese semantic relations can be conducted.In addition,The revision we have done to NT structure theory to adapt to the Chinese interlanguage provide a alternative choice for future studies referring to the same theory.