Corpus-based error analysis and teaching strategy research on the acquisition of pivotal sentence by Chinese learners from universities in China

Liang Chuyi*

doi:10.64649/yh.eg.issn3078-4794.20260403

Corpus-based error analysis and teaching strategy research on the acquisition of pivotal sentence by Chinese learners from universities in China

期刊: 《Educational Guide》 DOI:10.64649/yh.eg.issn3078-4794.20260403 全文阅读返回期刊

Liang Chuyi*

Faculty of Social Sciences, QUEST INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, Ipoh,Perak 30250, Malaysia.

摘要

Anyone who has taught Chinese grammar to international students will recognise the pivotal construction as something learners keep getting wrong, no matter how many times it is explained. It is simply too different from the syntactic devices that most other languages use for causative and imperative meanings. In this paper, we take a close look at how this construction is actually acquired, drawing on a combined corpus of 3,648 pivotal-construction utterances produced by international students studying in China—708 of which turned out to contain errors once we had worked through the annotation. What we found is not a single neat picture but a layered one. Syntactic problems account for the largest share of errors, at 58.2%, followed by semantic issues at 31.5% and pragmatic ones at 10.3%. Missing constituents, wrong choice of pivotal verb, and register confusion stand out as the most recurring sub-types. Perhaps the most interesting finding is how differently learners from Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines struggle with the structure—each group shows a distinctive error profile that mirrors the typological distance between their mother tongue and Chinese. Behind these patterns lie not one cause but several: the construction's own nested complexity, first-language transfer, overgeneralisation of what has already been learned, weak learning strategies, and shortcomings in textbooks and teaching. Based on what the data suggest, we sketch out a five-step corpus-driven teaching model and offer concrete suggestions across four areas: textbook design, classroom methods, learner strategies, and practice activities.

关键词

International Chinese Language Education; pivotal construction; error analysis; corpus; teaching strategy

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