A Study Of Herbert Allen Giles's Chinese Without A Teacher And It's Enlightenment On Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

This thesis mainly studies an introduction textbook of spoken Chinese which titled Chinese Without A Teacher written by British sinologist Herbert Allen Giles.The book was published in 1872,and republished several times in the next years,the one the thesis focuses on is the ninth version.It mainly analyzes the writing background,the teaching content and learning methods of the textbook.In the late Qing Dynasty,as Britain's economic and diplomatic interests in China expanded,they needed more people who were familiar with Chinese language and Chinese affairs.During this period,a large number of "old China hand" to learn Chinese emerged,and Giles is one of them.The works of his life are very rich,and Chinese Without A Teacher is a short-term textbook for oral Chinese which published five years after Giles came to China.Before the publication of the textbook,he had learnt with Morrison's Dictionary of the Chinese Language and Thomas' s Y� Yen Tzu Erh Chi,but the content of these two is so difficult to learn that Giles was confused and thought about the text compilation.After teaching his wife to learn Chinese,Giles got some Chinese teaching experience and applied them to the preparation of Chinese Without A Teacher.Unlike previous books that only focused on explaining Chinese language rules or Chinese character learning,the textbook stands on learners' position,attempts to express Chinese sounds in simple English,not stresses much on the pronunciation of the language,and dilutes the concept of grammar,allowing learners to imitate pronunciation to achieve the goal of mastering oral Chinese,which is greatly welcomed by learners.An Idiom a Lesson was published by Frederick William Baller in 1920,its writing objectives and teaching content are similar to the Chinese Without A Teacher.Therefore,the thesis comparatively analyse these two textbooks from the preparation of body examples,teaching content,speech system and vocabulary,the result shows that Chinese Without A Teacher has a greater advantage in the phonetic system and vocabulary,it is more suitable for learners who want who desires to speak Chinese as soon as possible,but not suitable for those who want to lay the foundation for in-depth study of Chinese.After analyzing the Chinese learning path of Herbert Allen Giles and his Chinese Without A Teacher,it is concluded that the enlightenment to the Chinese textbookcompilation mainly has the following aspects:(1)the teaching content needs to be practical;(2)teaching materials need to be targeted,have clear teaching objectives and select identified learning groups;(3)the content of teaching must be in line with the needs and abilities of learners.For Chinese learners,they need to:(1)a reasonable conversion motivation;(2)full immersion in the target language environment;and(3)not just focus on language learning but culture learning.