Examining The Difficulty Level Of Primary Listening Materials From Three Dimensions

In teaching Chinese as a foreign language,teaching about language skills is particularly important.Only when learners master basic language skills can they lay a solid foundation for the rest of their Chinese learning.Compared with speaking,reading and writing skills,listening skills are given priority.At the early stage of Chinese learning,learners mainly rely on "listening",and the effect of listening teaching can directly determine the learners’ preliminary Chinese level.As the basis for teachers’ teaching and students’ learning,listening materials largely influence the effect of listening teaching,especially for elementary learners,the role of teaching materials is more obvious.At present,there are many studies on elementary Chinese teaching materials and elementary listening teaching,but the number of studies on elementary listening materials is very small,and most of them analyze the materials through the arrangement of various language items and language exercises,but there is no research on the difficulty of listening materials.As a companion textbook to the first-year Chinese Course,the Chinese Listening Course can also be used as a primary listening training textbook alone,so its difficulty should be in line with the language level of international students who are learning Chinese for the first time.However,after observing and investigating the primary Chinese listening class in the College of International Exchange in my university,I found that the Chinese Listening Course textbook used in the listening class is difficult for the beginners,which is manifested by the stagnant classroom atmosphere,students’ lack of understanding of the listening materials and their inability to keep up with the teacher’s classroom teaching progress.Therefore,this paper takes the listening materials as the starting point,and first analyzes the three volumes of the Chinese Listening Course for Beginners from three dimensions:vocabulary,discourse,and phonetics,to investigate how difficult the materials are and how they affect learners’ learning of Chinese.Then a survey is conducted on the international students who have used the textbooks,and the level of difficulty of the textbooks is analyzed in the light of the learners’ feelings and feedback.Finally,we try to propose suggestions for the development of primary listening materials and improvement methods for teachers’ listening teaching,so as to promote the development of listening teaching in Chinese as a foreign language.Using Krashen’s input hypothesis and constructivist learning theory as the theoretical basis,this paper examines and analyzes three dimensions of the difficulty of the three textbooks of the Chinese Listening Course,and conducts a questionnaire survey on the textbook corpus with learners as the research subjects.According to the results of the textbook analysis and questionnaire survey,the author summarizes that the difficulty of the set of listening materials is mainly manifested as follows:First,the uneven distribution of vocabulary in terms of number and level,and the large gap in the number and difficulty of the vocabulary in the three books;Second,the difficulty factor of the discourse is high,and the difficulty of the discourse between lessons and books is not closely connected;Third,the speed of the listening recordings is fast,which is beyond the learners’ acceptable range.Combining the difficulty level shown in the set,the author makes her own suggestions on the writing of the primary listening materials and the teaching of listening teachers.This paper draws conclusions about teaching materials and teaching from the perspective of listening materials through data analysis and questionnaire survey,hoping to deepen the knowledge of foreign Chinese listening materials writers and teachers about the role of teaching materials in the learning process of international students,and to broaden the research field of factors affecting international students’ listening comprehension.