Studies On Communicative Cultural Factors Of Elementary Spoken Chinese Courses

To help students develop their cross-cultural communicative competence is one of the most important goals of Chinese teaching,which is also the characteristic of speaking courses.The research object of this paper is elementary spoken Chinese courses,and we will give suggestions on the teaching contents and methods by analyzing textbooks,making a survey of students and interviewing teachers.In the first chapter,we analyzed the current studies on cultural factors,and found out that current researches mostly focus on cultural factors as a whole,and mostly took integrated textbooks as their research objects.In the second chapter,we investigated the communicative cultural factors in three elementary spoken Chinese textbooks.The results shows that cultural factors which have highest proportion in the three textbooks are all terms of address and greetings,and cultural words have a high proportion in semantic cultural factors.There are not much body language in non-verbal communicative culture.Terms of address,honorific and self-depreciatory expressions,words that cannot be translated directly and thanks have a high repetition rate,while that of social etiquette,daily life and cultural words are low.Cultural factors are leaded in by texts,exercises,pictures and special parts explaining culture.The third chapter is about the analysis of the questionnaire to elementary language learners.Questions that have high accuracy are about euphemism,cultural loaded words,leaving-takings and daily life,and those which have low accuracy are about greetings,thanks,formula,apology,cultural words and social etiquette.Students are generally interested in thanks,leaving-takings and apology,and they think pragmatic cultural factors are more difficult than semantic ones.Study methods they like to use are talking with Chinese,using dialogues in the textbook and watching videos about culture.In the last chapter,on the basis of the results of analyzing textbooks,investigating students and interviewing teachers,we gave suggestions to elementary Chinese spoken courses on teaching contents and teaching methods.According to our research,key points of teaching includes greetings,terms of address,thanks,and the difficulties includes social etiquette and culture-loaded words.The teaching methods we could use are text lead-in method,communicative practice method,multimedia lead-in method,culture contrast method,and the method of recurrence.