Situation Analysis and Suggestions for the Standarization of Degree Complements as an Educational Grammar Item

For Chinese education in Korea, the ability to produce grammatically correct sentences is an important indicator for evaluating communication skills. Cultivating grammatical competence not only helps to improve conversation ability, but also is a necessity for the improvement of reading and writing skills. The communicative teaching system centered on ‘function-usage’ and the grammar education system centered on ‘structure-knowledge’ should coordinate with each other in the process of cultivating learners’ grammatical competencies. At present, the Chinese grammar education in Korea lacks a clear system, and even the standardization of educational grammar items has not yet been completed. It is frequent to see that educational grammar books and teaching materials use different terms to describe the same grammatical phenomenon, and these authors have different opinions. The standardizations of grammar system and grammar items of Korea’s Chinese education need to be solved urgently.BR Due to the large difference between the two languages, it is quite difficult for Korean learners to acquire Chinese degree complements and they are prone to making mistakes. This paper, taking degree complement as the research object, inspected the terms, categories and descriptions of degree complements in Chinese educational grammar syllabus and educational grammar works in China and Korea, and analyzed their shortcomings.BR First of all, in Chinese education, most of the degree complements (collective), state complements, and degree complements (differential) are called “degree complements”, which confuses learners.BR Secondly, some treatises call ‘state complements’ as ‘modal complements’ or “pattern complements”, all of which refer to almost the same category. In the process of grammar teaching, the inconsistency of terminologies has intensified the confusion of teachers and learners.BR Then, almost all treatises and books describe the semantic function of Chinese complement as: added after the predicate (verb, adjective) to reflect the degree of action or state. This kind of literal translation of Chinese grammar works brings about some problems. It is very difficult for Korean learners to correctly understand and express the concept of “degree of action”.BR Finally, when pointing out the adjectives, verbs, and psychological verb predicates that can be used to match degree complements (collective) and degree complements (differential), authors never come to an agreement. Some skip the expression of “predicate” at the syntactic level, but directly mix the concept of “verbs, adjectives (phrases)” at the morphological level with the “complement (sentence elements)” at the syntactic level, making learners at a loss. In addition, when explaining the structure of ‘verb + object + verb + ‘de’ + degree complement/state complement/pattern complement’, different authors use different expressions such as ‘degree complement (collective)’, ‘state complement’, and ‘modal complement’, which causes a confusion of concepts. This inconsistency in the expression and interpretation of concepts has confused teachers and students both in the actual teaching and ability evaluation process, and also led learners to make a large number of mistakes. Such problems can be solved effectively through the standardization of Chinese educational grammar. This paper points out that the standards and principles are ‘correctness, system, universality, appropriateness and relative hierarchy’. It is hoped that the scope of application of the above-mentioned standards and principles can be extended from degree complements to the establishment of Chinese educational grammar system in Korean, and become the research basis for the formulation of Chinese grammar education syllabus. At the same time, the early realization of the standardization of Chinese educational grammar items is also expected.