Primary Study On Development Of Entry-Level Mandarin Teaching Materials In View Of Sino-US Cross-Culture Communication

In alignment with the development and influence of China, the "Mandarin Fever" is expanding all over the world. To meet with the diversified needs of learners, it is necessary to reform the traditional teaching materials of Mandarin. Taking into consideration the teaching of both the language knowledge and the cross-cultural communication ability, the author has designed a new teaching material which combines the language points and cultural differences for Mandarin learners. The aim of the teaching material is to create a new teaching methodology for TCFL, enabling learners master the language as well as the culture through practice, a simulated cultural setting, graphs, and interactive activities.Preparations were analyzing the culture characters of China and US, trying to discover the culture conflicts and widespread culture misunderstandings. These were help to find the point cuts to the unit contents. The differences between Chinese and English grammar was also to be analyzed. The common-used words in daily life were collected. Language functions were chosen to fit the teaching materials.The Mandarin material "Chinese---Look Read and Learn" is aimed at the American adult Mandarin learners for beginning level. Use Standard of TCFL as guidelines, Refer to the New HSK's language functions and grammar outlines of level 3. This material includes seven parts, which are Read Pinyin, Tell stories, Compare the cultures, Check the Grammars, Remember the Words, Recognize the Characters and Search the Information. Read Pinyin includes Introductions, Flash Cards and Comparison practice of Pinyin. Tell stories include Read the Dialogue, Learn the Expressions, and Connects. Compare the Cultures include Link, Culture Q&A and notes. Check the grammars include Comparisons of Chinese and English grammar, Sentence Pattern. Remember the words include Rainbow words and vocabulary land. Recognize the characters include the introduction of the Chinese characters, the index of radicals and Single characters, flash cards and the text of Read the dialogue. Search the information include information of Shanghai city. These seven separate parts are all inner-contacted.The innovation of this development is that the material is from the perspective of cross-culture communication, and based on the theory of Cognition Psychology, open-developed, informative and practical. This material could be used for teaching in class, also for readings as well.