On Africa Intensive Chinese Preparation And Use Of Training Materials

The textbook for teaching Chinese as a second language often functions as the basic carrier for the implementation of the second language classroom teaching, and it is also the important and key media for the realization of the objects of the secnd language teaching of Chinese. The textbook for intensive Chinese language training is one type of the textbooks of teaching Chinese as a second language. In the research of teaching Chinese language to international students, by writing and using the textbook which has some relationship with the learners’own culture, the researcher can not only implement some practical demonstration and verification of the related theories for second language teaching, he can also undertake some profound investigations about the teaching phenomenons and principles of second language teaching of Chinese in some special cultural environment.Learn to Speak Chinese came into being because of the double purposes of research and language teaching, it was intentionally written for the short-term, intensive Chinese language classes in Eritrea. The new textbook was composed in accordance with the standards of both the International Curriculum for Chinese Language Education, and Chinese Language Proficiency Scales for Speakers of Other Languages, and what is more important is that, it locates the learners on some very key positions. In fact, both the writing and using of this textbook provides rich and live resources for the research, and in return, the research has provided the practical teaching with reasonable directions of methods and strategies. Taking the dialogue of each lesson as the main line, Learn to Speak Chinese connects the knowledge learning of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, discourse, Chinese characters, and the Chinese culture, with the training of the learners’ability, it provides the learners with possibly sufficient learning programs and opportunities in certain teaching periods with intensified strategies, in this case, just after some limited learning period of time, the learners started to have some relatively complete comprehension and practical skills of their target language, Chinese.By using the self-write textbook and other recordings of the learners’learning (the video of teaching and learning, the photos, and the homework assignments) as the researching materials, this research has carried out some investigation in the multi-cultural social context about the learning process of the ways of gaining basic Chinese language knowledge and basic communicative skills of the Eritrean learners, who have Tigrigna as their mother tongue, English and other Eritrean dialects as their second languages. The research about the writing and using of the Chinese language textbook which has some features of the learners’culture, can be used as reference for other Chinese teaching practice in the similar cultural context; and, the viewpoints and methods produced in the research will also have the values of reference for other research practice.The textbook of Chinese as a second language has its own special standards of categorization; it also has its own properties and functions. Learn to Speak English possesses its categorical features as a second language textbook; it also possesses the related properties and functions.By providing a simplified reflection of the history of the textbook writing of Chinese as a second language, this paper summarizes the three historical stages of such practice in China. The textbooks of each stage reflected their different teaching ideologies, the differences of which demonstrated the conclusions or the heights of their developments of the teaching theories of those different historical periods. All three differences of each stage threw their light on the textbooks, whose patterns can be classified as "the structural pattern","the structural-functional pattern", and "the structural-functional-cultural pattern".It is on the base of profound understanding of the textbook users (the learners) that the writing of Learn to Speak Chinese started. The key points the writing of the textbook kept during the writing process were "putting the learners in the centre of teaching", and outstanding the structural characteristic of the combination of the three elements "the structure, the function, and the culture". In certain parts of this paper, the writer offers some detailed description and explanation of both the different contents and their arrangements in the textbook, after some re-explanations of the different meanings of "the structure, the function, and the culture".Whether the textbook written by the research with the double purposes of research and teaching can perform its role and function well, it mainly depends on the conditions if it can stand the tests in the classroom, or if it can be accepted and acknowledged by the learners. Learn to Speak English has been popular in different classes, its popularity shows that, only the textbook which has been acknowledged by the learners can effectively improve the learners’knowledge learning of the target language, and also improve the cultivation of their skills in using it. It is widely agreed that, only by making good use of the textbook in the Chinese language teaching class, can the knowledge and skills of the target language be taught and practiced. These knowledge and skills include the knowledge and skill of pronunciation, the knowledge and skill of vocabulary, the knowledge and skill of discourse, the knowledge and skill of grammar, and the knowledge and skill of the Chinese characters.For the Eritrean Chinese language learners, their way of practicing Chinese pronunciation is, in fact, a procession, during which their errors of pronunciation have been continuously corrected, and bit by bit, their pronunciations of Chinese characters and sentences have been getting more and more accurate. For the teacher, it has been extremely important to implement some analysis and investigation about the reasons of the learners’errors, because, only by finding out the final reasons, can the problems be possibly and effectively solved. For example, the solutions for the following pronouncing errors became possible just after some researching analysis and investigations have been done:1.The Eritrean learners frequently made wrong pronunciation about the Chinese final "e", because they have been negatively interfered by the pronunciation of their mother language Tigrinya’s vowel sound "n", which is a kind of negative transfer.2.The reason for the learners’errors about the Chinese final "u" has been simple but hard, because it is a totally marked Chinese vowel sound that only very few other languages have, the learners cannot find any help to pronounce it in all the languages they are familiar.3.The reason why the Eritrean learners make mistakes when they pronounce the Chinese initial "t" is because they have been unconsciously influenced by their wrong sensations that this "t" has the nearly similar sounds as the certain ones in their mother language Tigrigna, Arabic, and even in English, which is certainly another example of negative transfer.4. The writer’s innovative viewpoint of "Zero Final with Tone Method" came into being because the learners repeatedly made errors when they pronounced the two allophones of the final "i". The teaching experiments proved that the method can act positively effective in correcting the learners’errors.The study of the Chinese vocabulary is the key step for the learners to build their Chinese language ability, and the vocabulary studying is one of the basic activities in Chinese language class. For the classes with the style of intensive training, the study and practice of the basic Chinese vocabulary has always been one of the key tasks, as the Chinese characters which need to be handled in such classes are all basic and fundamental elements of the teaching, the learners have to master all of them if they want to make their vocabulary expanded. Therefore, the proficiency of vocabulary teaching and learning depends heavily on the teachers’innovative ways of making better use of the textbook to teach the characters.The learners’discourse competence, e.g. the ability to organize sentences into texts or passages can not only greatly help to cultivate and improve their oral ability, it can also reasonably prompt and strengthen their ability to master and use the target language freely and skillfully. Only when the learners are able to express themselves both in speaking and in writing in target language, can they be acknowledged that they have made practical progress in their learning of the target language. The cultivation of the discourse competence should be carried out from the very beginning, that is to say, it needs to start from the early learning of the vocabulary and dialogues. As the theory of cohesion and coherence has been considered as the core theory of discourse, the paper has made series of analysis with the theory of cohesion and coherence about the17different "discourse recommended" of the textbook Learn to Speak Chinese. Such analysis theatrically demonstrates the reasonability and necessity of including such contents in the book.As the rules for the organization of language items, grammar represents the thinking characteristics of the language users. In the limited space of Learn to Speak Chinese, the basic rules of both Chinese language knowledge and skills were carefully arranged in the order of being from simple and easy ones to the hard ones, with the purposes of helping the learners to grasp the basic rules of the language knowledge and skills on one hand, on the other, to help them understand and experience the thinking features hidden in the Chinese language. This can surely help them to comprehend the particular enchantment of the language, Chinese. The Chinese language grammar has very strong motivation, which has the advantage of leading the learners to experience and comprehend the direct features of the language in classroom teaching, and this can absolutely improve their confidence in their learning of Chinese.As having been considered as the fundamental point of the whole language structures, the Chinese characters represent the thinking characteristics of the whole community of all the language users, with their special forms of combinations of pronunciation, grapheme, and meaning. It is true that if we compare the Chinese language with the alphabetic languages, the Chinese characters do have somewhat difficulty in memorizing and in writing, but the Chinese language’s charm and attraction also exist for these interesting graphemes and structures. Therefore, it is the glorious task of the cause of Teaching Chinese to International students, to encourage the learners’enthusiasm to read, to write, to memorize the Chinese characters, so to fully encourage the learners to develop their ability to use this language. And, this is also one of the main tasks of the intensive Chinese language training class.If the research directs the way for the teaching, then, the teaching absolutely prompts the research forward. This is really a valuable and creative way for the development of the theory of second language teaching.