A Comparative Study On The Lexical Levels Of TCFL And TCMT Textbooks

Lexical teaching which plays an important part in TCFL and TCMT, goes throughout the process of language teaching. Levels of words and its systematicness decide the different levels of lexical teaching. The textbook is a key media for teachers to teach and for students to learn words. But words in texts are flexible use of words in the vocabulary in specific contexts, which can represent real lexicons of textbooks comprised of texts. Most researchers focus on how to make a word list and then how to compile a textbook, however, few can look into the words based on texts in various textbooks.This study chooses representative TCFL (Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language) textbooks and TCMT (Teaching Chinese as Mother Tongue) textbooks, three respectively, as subjects. And two respective databases are established. The theories of Chinese Lexics, cognitive psychology, language teaching and textbook compiling are adopted, combined with databases, statistics and comparison, to explore the words in texts. The three textbooks of the same type and two different types of textbooks are compared and analyzed in three aspects (total amount of words, word classes and recently-added word classes) and three dimensions ( dispersion of part of speech, word length and tokens of lexicon, distribution in different textbooks). Based on that comparison and analysis, the lexical levels of those textbooks are described; the similarities and differences, the characteristics and its reason and the problems reflected are explored; finally, the points and solutions of lexical choosing in compiling language textbooks are recommended.