A Comparative Study Of American And Chinese Mother Tongue Workbook

Mother tongue curriculum, as one of the basic courses, is to develop the multiple ability of using mother tongue. And the core task of it is to develop the abilities of hearing, reading, speaking and writing. So mother tongue curriculum is a language training course in nature has been decided. Exercise plays an important part in mother tongue study both in and out of the classroom. The systematic research in the mother tongue workbook is needed not only for improving the teaching efficiency in the classroom, but also for the self-development of teaching theory of mother tongue curriculum. Spectrum, located in California in America, published the Spectrum workbook series in 2007, and People Education Publishing House published Chinese Workbook in 2005. These two sets of workbooks have a great comparative quality for they have been published in the same period and both of them represent their countries'characters in mother tongue workbook.The article gives a systematic study of these two sets of workbooks in macroscope and microscope by the synthesis utilization of literature method, comparison method and individual cases method. In macroscope, I would compare the contents and system detailedly from talking about the way of thinking of these two sets of workbooks. In microscope, I would research the reading and writing exercise systematically and draw inspiration from the similarities and differences between two countries'workbooks.In the concepts of design, there are more differences than similarities between mother tongue workbook of American California's Spectrum Edition and Chinese Exercise of People Education Edition. It can be mainly expressed as: Spectrum Edition's mother tongue workbook doesn't just represent the contents of mother tongue textbook, it emphasizes the learning methods and attitudes, and the purpose is to train the ability of self-study. But Chinese Exercise of People Education Edition tries to consolidate the classroom learning by doing exercises. Based on different concepts, these two kinds of workbooks have great differences in content system and structure. So I decided to make a comparison of each workbook's content structure and system from talking about their concepts of design, especially focus on the inspiration from Spectrum Edition's mother tongue workbook to the construction of our country's Chinese workbook. From the comparison, it can be noted that: There is also integration except differences in two sets of workbooks. For reading, both of them take the subject as units, consider the adaptation while choosing the reading passages, emphasize the emotional education, and they all pay much attention on training the ability of using the language and solving the problems in particular language environment, but to the ways of presenting, each of them shows respective characteristics. For writing, American California's Spectrum Edition provides a new vision to us on how to divide writing contents and arrange guiding process. The writing exercise in Spectrum Edition divides the narration into six types according to the reader and writing purpose and then gives a particular systematic guide to each type. Based on these elaborations, I drew the conclusion in the last chapter of the article. It is in eight aspects that we should obtain the enlightenment from the mother tongue workbook of American California's Spectrum Edition. They are systematizing the compiling way of Chinese workbook, turning the exercise system to self-study advantage, considering the adaptation while choosing the reading passages, using the index directly, dividing the writing contents in a scientific style, guiding the writing in a certain procedure, typesetting and binding by people and adding interest by combining the pictures and texts.