Confucius Institute at Kansai Gaidai University Holds the 6th Training Lecture  for Chinese Language Teachers in Western Japan

On October 24th 2010, the 6th Training Lecture for Chinese Language Teachers in Western Japan was held by the Confucius Institute at Kansai Gaidai University. The lecture focused on discussing the underlying reasons for the incorrect grammar used when writing Chinese sentences by Japanese students.

The morning lecture entitled Impact of Mother Tongue’s Negative Transfer on Second Language Learning was given by Ren Ying, Professor of Kobe Foreign Languages University and the afternoon lecture entitled Chinese Grammar Teaching was given by Jin Changji, Professor of Osaka University. Both of these two professors are well-known scholars of Chinese grammar research as well as teachers who have rich experience teaching Chinese language to Japanese students, and as such there were many common points shared by their lectures.

Both of these two speakers prepared many examples of wrong sentences in Chinese made by Japanese students. These sentences provided informative evidence for the arguments in their lectures. Amongst those sentences, Professor Jin Changji’s had a great number of examples, all very typical, classified, systematical and of individual reference value themselves. The analysis by the two speakers was very detailed and pertinent. In addition, the cognitive and pragmatic causes of these mistakes were analyzed with great attention. Issues, including the difference between Chinese and Japanese passive sentences, the usage of ‘men’, the limited usage of ‘le’, were analyzed in detail.

Over 20 students were greatly interested in the lecture and they commented this lecture as ‘interesting’ and ‘effective’. Based on grammatical analysis, this lecture adopted a research method proceeding from cognition and pragmatics and was established on the research attitude of serving teaching. All of those contributed to the success of the two-part lecture.