Research On The Discourse And Text Exercises In Advanced Chinese Comprehensive Textbooks

Text books play an important role through the whole teaching process as a major resource and tool for both teachers and learners. And the discourse exercise is one of the most significant part of the text book, which helps to train students'expressing ability. However, little attention was paid to the discourse exercise when compiling a textbook. Meanwhile, related researches are relatively few. Hence it is necessary to conduct a research on discourse exercises. This thesis attempts to make a discussion about discourse exercises in the textbook of Chinese Advanced Comprehensive Course.Based on the theory of text linguistics, eight sets of Chinese advanced comprehensive text books from different periods of time are selected as the research objects.. We use methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, with the help of data analyzing software, in order to make an evaluation from the following aspects:Firstly, the paper discusses the number of exercises and the design of exercise patterns by comparing the total number, the average number of every unit and the distribution condition of the selected textbooks. The data shows that the number of exercises is increasing in every textbook, while the number of exercise patterns varies a lot from case to case, and they're distributed out of order in a few textbooks. The paper comes up with some suggestions concerning issues like the number of exercises and exercise patterns, and the diversity of exercise patterns.Secondly, the paper makes a general summary of the content included in advanced discourse teaching, with which a contrastive study is made to compare the content covered in exercises of current textbooks. It is found that nearly all the textbooks fail to cover the teaching content in their exercises. Textbooks edited before 2005 attached more importance to the understanding of discourse structure, while those compiled after 2005 place more emphasis on the training of the discourse cohesion and coherence, upon which the paper also makes some tentative design.Thirdly, based on four goals set for the advance discourse teaching, the paper categorizes and counts the exercise number and pattern in selected textbooks to evaluate how well they meet the teaching goals. Statistics show that, among books after 2005, the number of exercises on discourse cohesion and coherence has exceeded that on correctness.Lastly, through a survey towards textbook users, the thesis observes whether selected textbooks can abide by the pragmatic rule and the enjoyable rule. Two concluding points are made:one is the application of the pragmatic rule is better than that of the enjoyable rule, the other is the number of topics for expression exercises is insufficient. According to the survey, upon some exercises, there is an obvious difference between the comment on the pragmatic rule and the enjoyable rule given by teachers and that by students. Some possible reasons are provided, and it is concluded that the application of the pragmatic rule lay the foundation for the realization of the enjoyable rule.