Common Core-meaning And Its Application In Teaching Chinese Characters And Words To Foreigners

Language teaching has long been an integral part of Language Research.The Earliest Language teaching is mother-tongue teaching.And Chinese teaching has developed for more than two thousand years,and achieved great successes.Language teaching can promote the language research,like Xiao Xue in ancient China which has gradually grown up with the development of Chinese teaching.Ancient Chinese Philology,which focused on the six categories of Chinese characters,is the earliest philology theory discovered and summarized by the senior Chinese teachers,and it had a great impact on philology of later times.Language teaching has played a more and more important role in communications between different people in different language.What's more,official language should be spreaded around in order to expand the influence and develop soft power of the country.As a consequence,teaching of foreign language has become increasingly widespread.The same with China.A large number of Chinese students study foreign languages for the purpose of introduce foreign advanced technology and foreign culture after China's reform and opening up.And on the other hand,the country's strength is bigger and bigger,and it needs to spread Chinese language and culture abroad.Since the 1990 s,the state has set up international Chinese education,established a variety of Confucius Institutes around the world to promote Chinese language and the ancient Chinese culture implied in it.Under this background,teaching Chinese as a foreign language continues to move forward.The teaching of Chinese involves a wide range og aspects.such as pronunciation,writing,grammar,are all essential aspects of teaching.Among them,however,vocabulary teaching is the most important focus of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,as well as a difficult point in language teaching.Chinese language has tens of thousands of words with a long history and abundant literature which make it difficult to study.Over a long period of time,foreign students have many problems in learning Chinese words,and the main difficulties are: foreign students usually do not know how to read the words and what the words mean even when they face the words.In addition,students slowly learn but soon forget because they can not establish the system of Chinese vocabulary.Apart from these,the current teaching methods,for example,words-teaching according to the order of contexts,teaching in the semantic field,focus on the teaching of the word as a whole while despising morphemes of the words.Morpheme teaching only emphasizes the function of morpheme strings,but it is not enough to explore the semantic motivation of words,so that students know what they are but do not know why they are.The signifier teaching has highlighted the hint of the Chinese character font to the meaning,but it still has some limitations in revealing the meaning of the word.This paper attempts to put forward the idea of introducing core-meaning,which is specially emphasize on the systematicness of vocabulary,in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Compared with the four common word teaching methods,the teaching based on core-meaning has obvious advantages.Core-meaning is a kind of word teaching mode focusing on vocabulary system,which use core-meaning to control words and construct word network from the meaning level of Chinese.Core-meaning is not only the meaning core of every word,but also the meaning core of every word in a concept field.The semantic network formed by the words controlled by the core-meaning can better indicate the connection between words and their meanings,and is beneficial to cultivate the students' ability to infer the unknown from the known association.The teaching method based on core-meaning is a new attempt of vocabulary teaching: firstly,the common parts of meanings of different words are abstracted from their meanings,that is,the common core of meaning;secondly,the words with the same core-meaning are controlled by the core-meaning,and word aggregates are constructed.We also use the core-meaning to understand and compare the meanings of words,find language universals and promote word learning.In order to verify the possibility and feasib ility of this assumption,this paper takes the Chinese characters included in the HSK vocabulary syllabus as the research object,and examines the Chinese characters and their constituent words.HSK vocabulary syllabus is a standardized Chinese level vocab ulary and Chinese character ranking syllabus.It is based on relevant dynamic word frequency statistics and authoritative list of commonly used words,and it also carries out statistics,screening and compilation according to the laws of teaching Chinese as a foreign language and the acquisition rules of overseas students,therefore it is the main basis for Chinese Proficiency Test and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.There have been many studies on the syllabus,but there is no report on the study of the syllabus from the perspective of core meaning.In view of the correspondence between Chinese characters and Chinese morphemes and Chinese words,this paper takes the Chinese characters included in the Chinese Character Outline as the research object,analyzes their relations and generalizes their common meanings based on the meanings of the corresponding Chinese monosyllabic words.I have been interested in the study of Chinese International Education for a long time and have been engaged in teaching Chinese as a foreign language,which make me able to practice and observe whether the method is suitable,understand the advantages and disadvantages of this teaching method through students' classroom performance,and provide the basis and materials for writing this paper.This paper begins with the problems existing in the practice of word teaching,as well as the advantages and disadvantages of several common word teaching methods.On the basis of summing up the relevant research results,it puts forward the attempt and assumption of the teaching method based on core-meaning for the first time.As for the possibility of the application of core-meaning,this paper proves it by examples such as“?”“??”“???”“?????”“???????”“???????”?The analysis shows that core-meaning exists in reality.It runs through the relevant meanings of words and has the characteristics of implicitness,abstractness and hierarchy.Other examples like“?”“?”“?”,show that core-meaning may be manifested as some notable characteristics,abstract functions or movement characteristics of things.In order to verify the feasibility of the application of core-meaning,this paper refers to the "three-level comparison method" of Mr.Huang Shuxian and puts forward the three-step construction method,that is,on the basis of the research results of cognate words,combining with the common meanings and original meanings,this paper deduces the common core of meaning in two directions,a nd then constructs a hierarchical word aggregate from a single word to a group of words from bottom to top.Subsequently,the paper discusses the role of applied core-meaning: core-meaning is the key to understand the meaning of word s;as a node,core-meaning connective words,making it a meaningful whole,thus helping students to establish a Chinese word network in their mind;meanwhile,in the context of the conceptual field constructed by the core-meaning,it is more conducive to discovering some rules of the extension of word meaning and linguistic commonalities,which have a positive effect on Chinese language learning.Of course,there are two sides to everything.There are strengths and limitations in the application of core-meaning.This paper illustrates with examples the limitations of the application of core-meaning: first,not all meanings are controlled by the core-meaning;second,not all meanings can be explained by the core-meaning.The significance of core-meaning teaching in this paper has some innovations.On the one hand,the study of Chinese core-meaning has always been in the study of Chinese ontology and etymology.Many valuable achievements have been made in this field,such as the establishment of a conceptual field around the common core of meaning,the diachronic study of the evolution and substitution of words in the field,or the synchronic study of the relationship between meaning and meaning.On the other hand,facing the difficulties of learning,the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language puts forward the theory and method of word teaching which should embody its own characteristics,and makes many attempts.It is also an attempt to start from the core-meaning,which is the common core and links several words.It not only highlights the motivation of meaning,but also helps to study the comparison and evolution of meaning.There is no report on the introduction of core-meaning research into teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Many problems have not been studied in depth,and there are many problems and puzzles.We believe that,in order to find a teaching method suitable for Chinese characteristics,we should draw more nourishment from the research results of Chinese ontology,constantly explore,and push Chinese international education to a new height.