A Comparative Study on Teaching Chinese and Korean Topic Sentences

주제문을 통한 한국학생의 중국어 학습지도 연구 - 중·한 주제문의 비교를 중심으로

Chinese is a topic-prominent language, so when we learn Chinese we should know the discourse function of the Chinese language. Most of the Korean student think Chinese sentences should appear in the order of S-V-O and they always make mistakes when they use Chinese. I think Korean is very similar with Chinese in the discourse function. Hence, in this paper, I try to find a method of teaching Chinese topic sentence. It does so by comparing Chinese with Korean in the light of discourse function. I think when Korean student know how to use Korean topic sentence to explain the discourse functions of the Chinese language, they will not make similar mistakes. With this understanding in mind, chapter 2 tries to show various topic sentences to prove that 'topic' is very important in Chinese sentences. This is why we say Chinese is a topic-prominent language. In chapter 3, I analysis the sentences that students made, and highlight the reasons why they made mistake. The result lies in the reason whereby they always think Chinese should appear in the order of S-V-O. They do not understand why some sentences appear in the order of O-(S)V or S-O-V. It show that they do not know what is topic sentence and do not know how to make topic sentences. Sometime I have them translate them into Korean, but they also make Korean sentences like in the order of Chinese S-V-O. Therefore, I think, under this circumstance, to let them to translate and to speak in Korean in topic sentence, get some feelings about Chinese topic sentences, and tell and make Chinese topic sentences are naturally critical in their training.