THE ERROR ANALYSIS AND TEACHING ADVICE FOR THE USE OF THE PREPOSITION “GEI” IN MODERN CHINESE FOR THAI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

This paper utilized a questionnaire to investigate the situation of Thai university students learning Chinese language in Thailand using the Chinese preposition “gei”, and through the statistical analysis of the error data of the questionnaire intermediary word “gei”. It was found that the highest error rate was “gei 2”, where the semantic feature introduced the service object of the action behavior, which had the meaning of helping or assisting someone to do something. Furthermore, the lowest error rate was
“gei 1 (S2: S-V-O-gei-X)”. On the question of whether the syntactical structure S1 could be converted into the syntactical structure S2, the learners found that the mastery of S1: S+gei+X+V+O could be converted into S2: S-V-O-gei-X, which was better than that of S1: S+gei+X+V+O which could not be converted into S2: S-V-O-gei-X. In the analysis of the error use cases, there were two types of error
according to the error rate from high to low: misuse and error order. The causes of error were summarized in four aspects: 1. Negative transfer of the mother tongue, 2. generalization of the target language, 3. the
influence of the learning strategy and communication strategy, and 4. teachers lacked the consciousness of error teaching.
In view of these four reasons, this paper put forward the following suggestions: first, teachers’ teaching reformed countermeasures, as well as inductive and deductive methods could be used to
strengthen teachers’ training in Chinese or Thai language when teaching the preposition “gei”, improve the Chinese and Thai teachers’ bilingual ability, implement Sino-Thai teachers’ cooperative teaching in a non-Chinese context, and deeply understand the negative transfer influence of the students’ mother tongue. Second, students would acquire the countermeasures, master the semantic and grammatical functions of the preposition “gei”, understand the semantics of the preposition “gei 1” to “gei 4”, and
the grammatical rules used with verbs. Finally, adopt appropriate learning strategies and do not rely too much on the mother tongue.