A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Textual Referents By American Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Second Language Learners

Based on the former studies in the theories of text analyse, we studied on the cohesion methods of the texts through the analysis on foreign students' essays by the way of error analysis and data analysis. We focused on four kinds of cohesion methods, which is, zero form pronoun, personal pronoun, deictic words, and deictic word + noun. We used the essays written by American students who were studying Chinese in Harvard University (including students in Harvard University, Yale University, Chicago University and MIT). Our purpose Is to find out if there is some acquisition order in the 4 ways of cohesion, and we have the result that, (1) There is significant difference between the 3^rd year and 5^th year's student on the error frequency on zero form pronoun and deitic words, while there is near significant difference on personal pronoun, (2) Among the 3^rd year's essay, there's significant difference on the error frequency between zero form pronoun, personal pronoun, deictic words, while the 5^th year shows the same tendency, (3) There is no significant difference the two years' students on the language style error frequency, while there are more errors made by the 5^th year's students than the 3^rd year's students on language style errors. Then we discussed the reasonfor that phenomenon and studied on the teaching material, one is used in China mainland, and oneis widely used in North America, and found some differences on how to teach on those language points, and gave some teaching suggestions based on that.