Study On Idioms Teaching In Teaching Chinese As Second Language

The acquisition of vocabulary, known as an indispensable part in TCSL (Teaching Chinese as Second Language), has not been attached enough importance it deserves. As a special lexical category, Chinese idioms provide foreign students with not only interest but also difficulty. Up to date, the studies on idioms in the field of TCSL put focus upon comparing Chinese culture and foreign culture, and their different influence on idioms. However, less attention is paid to the rules of studying idioms; thus no applicable methodology available to guide idioms teaching. That explains why it is important to study general idioms in the new perspective so as to explore some useful rules in idioms studying and teaching.In this paper, the author firstly emphasizes the significance of idioms teaching in TCSL. Being an important and difficult part of vocabulary teaching, Chinese idioms help to enhance our country' s traditional culture. A good command of them is also of great help to develop the cross-cultural interactive abilities of foreign students. We base our study upon the investigation of 140 pieces of compositions by foreign students. Following the precedent researches, we divided the errors in the usage of idioms into 4 groups: mis-handwriting, semantic misunderstanding, syntactic error and pragmatic failure. For the part of students, the causes for these errors we have found are: the shortage of knowledge of ancient Chinese culture, The interference from their native culture and a bad habit of studying idioms statically and isolatedly. For the part of teachers, the "lexime-centered" teaching method causes that there are limitations in the textbooks design, classroom management, and teachers' language proficiency, etc. In view of the current situation, this paper suggests 6 teaching methods: 1. to explain respectively the characters of the idiom, 2.to tackle with the meaning in tracing to the source of the idioms, 3. to draw inferences about other cases from one instance, 4. to specify idioms composition and their grammatical function, 5. to reproduce the context, 6. to compare Chinese and other languages. To achieve a more effective teaching, we hope that these methods are of great instruction to enhance the mastery of idioms.