A Study On Chinese Textbooks Of Missionaries In Modern China

Mandarin Grammar is a Chinese teaching textbook which was written by PerryCrawford, the preacher of The Southern Baptist Convention of U.S.A, and Zhang LuZhen who was a Chinese scholar. It studied the writing style which was used inWestern grammar textbooks. And it was also the Chinese grammar textbook whichwas used in the church school at that time. In Mandarin Grammar, the author fullyexplains the related theory of Chinese speech, Chinese characters, words, phrases,sentences, rhetoric, and equipped with a large number of examples which were easy tounderstand. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises for students to practice. Andthe textbook which was written in Chinese emphasized the importance of grammar ofspoken Chinese. Compared with other spoken grammar books written in westernlanguages, it has a unique advantage that in Chinese grammar research, it has theimportant theory significance and the practice significance. It was one of the earliesttextbook in Chinese taking northern Mandarin as the object of Chinese grammar.A Course of Mandarin Lessons based on Idiom is a Chinese oral textbook compiledby Calvin Wilson, a preacher of American missionary. Its purpose is to teach themissionaries the Chinese who came to China at that time, with spoken Chinese asteaching main body. The textbook was published in1892, took the northern Mandarinas a template combining with Nanjing Mandarin and Shandong dialect. It recordingspoken Chinese at the end of the nineteenth century was six years earlier than firstChinese grammar textbook Ma Shi Wen Tong.What the textbook contained was thespoken Mandarin and the words used in common. The textbook, whose characteristicswere known from view of the Indo European speakers, has important value both inthe writing of teaching materials and language study.The author of this paper tried to compare and analyze two Chinese teachingtextbooks which are Mandarin Grammar and A Course of Mandarin Lessons based onIdiom, and then sum up the characteristics of American missionaries’ modernChinesetextbooks. In addition, the author summarized the teaching strategies of Chineseteaching. The aim of this paper is to provide the historical data for the ontology research of the Chinese some and some useful reference for teaching Chinese as aforeign language.The first chapter is the introduction which introduced the significance of the topic,research status and research plan etc. The research of domestic literature aboutMandarin Grammar and A Course of Mandarin Lessons based on Idiom is not enough.And there is no precedent to compare and analyze the two textbooks. The purpose ofthis paper is to find a new method to reveal the history of the study of Chinese as aforeign language with this kind of attempt.The second chapter is about the research of Perry Crawfo rd’s textbook MandarinGrammar, which mainly introduced the life story of Perry Crawford and carried onthe introduction to the book from the book background, version, choreography and thecontent. The focus of this chapter is about the research of Mandarin Grammar fromthe aspect of voice, Chinese characters, grammar, rhetoric, corpus selection andexercises. Thus the evaluation on this book is as follows: Mandarin Grammarembodied the prospective of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and the bookuses the style to explain, at the end of the chapter are equipped with the relevantpractice, attaching importance to the oral teaching grammar and Chinese practicalpurposes, Mandarin Grammar can be regarded as to be at the initial stage of textbookcompilation of Chinese teaching as a foreign language.The third chapter is the research of A Course of Mandarin Lessons based on Idiom.It is mainly about the introduction of Calvin Wilson’s life and the analysis of thetextbook from the point of view of writing background, version, layout and synopsis.The focus of this chapter is the analysis of A Courseof Mandarin Lessons based on Idiom from the voice, vocabulary, grammar, Chinesecharacters and so on. In addition, it is about the objective evaluation of the textbook.The fourth chapter is the comparative study of Mandarin Grammar and A Course ofMandarin Lessons based on Idiom. It is mainly about the comparative analysis oftwofrom the grammar study, arrangement, teaching content, the principle of speech,Chinese characters and grammar. In general, the two both have the same also havedifference, from perspective of the development of the Chinese textbook, they are at different stages. Mandarin Grammar is at the initial stage, and Mandarin Grammarand A Course of Mandarin Lessons based on Idiom, which is the inheritance anddevelopment of Mandarin Grammar, has entered a mature stage.The conclusion part affirmed the historical status of the two textbooks in the historyof the development of Chinese teaching textbook and discusses the enlightenment ofthe two textbooks for the preparation of edition of today’s Chinese teaching textbooks.