Abstract
The present study adopts a corpus-based method to investigate the effectiveness and reliability of the confusable word sets listed in the L2 Chinese textbooks. Through the quantitative analysis based on the interlanguage corpus, we have found that, among 134 sets of words listed in the textbooks, only 50 sets have met the criterion we had set for “confusable words”. We hence provide a suggested word list based on the results of the analysis, a list of the sets that do not meet the criteria but are found in the corpus with more obvious mistaken usage, as well as a list of the sets that meet the criteria but are not the most typical ones. Through the preliminary research, it is hoped to provide teachers and textbooks editors with a more scientific method of selecting confusable words to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning.
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Notes
- 1.
The examples in this paper are taken from HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus 2.0, http://hsk.blcu.edu.cn/. In the corpus, we have found 25 tokens of 印象 (“impression”) that should be replaced with 影响 (“impact”), which account for 80.6% of the 31 misuse instances of 印象 (“impression”) in total. Meanwhile, 13 tokens of 影响 (“impact”) have been found to be misused and should be replaced with印象 (“impression”), accounting for 36.1% of the 36 misuse instances of影响 (“impact”) in total.
- 2.
5 tokens of 游行 (“to parade”) have been found in the corpus which should be replaced with 旅行 (“to travel”), which account for 62.5% of the 8 instances of misuse of 游行 (“to parade”) in total. No case has been observed that旅行 (“to travel”) is misused to express 游行 (“to parade”).
- 3.
There are 141 sets in total, with 7 sets are repeated which are not counted as a result.
- 4.
A set of confusable words could be divided into one-way misusing and two-way misusing, according to the directionality of misusing. The one-way misusing refers to the situations that only A is often misused as B, but B is not often misused as A. The two-way misusing refers to the situations that both A and B are often misused as each other.
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Acknowledgments
The work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, grant no. MOST 109-2410-H-002-189.
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Appendix 1: Empirical Results of Confusable Words in Textbooks
Appendix 1: Empirical Results of Confusable Words in Textbooks
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Chou, CT., Chang, Lp. (2021). A Preliminary Study of Confusable Words in L2 Chinese Textbooks. In: Liu, M., Kit, C., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12278. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_66
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