Intermediate Spoken Chinese Classes, Group Activities, Possible Factors

Group work has been raised attention greatly by the Teaching Chinese as Second Language Circle in the past ten years, which, as been a common-used teaching method, has been applied in the classrooms widely, and has produced a marked effect. Compared with those traditional teaching models, group work can cut down the anxiety, provide more opportunities for students to communicate, instruct students to learn social communication skills. Furthermore, it can stimulate students'motives in Chinese-learning, and can cultivate the team spirit for students.However, our practical teaching experiences are far from expectation and satisfaction. Problems such as, group works are more superficial than practical; participations in group works are not equal; dividing students into groups not scientifically and systematically; evaluation and feedback are subjective and single, etc. have been puzzling all the experts and teachers for a long time. All these problems could not help me wondering:which elements will effect the group work? Besides the foundational factor:task-design, how to analyze and evaluate the elements of teachers and students? In the element of students, how many students will be the perfect number? Is it beneficial to the group work whether the language capacity differs greatly or slightly? The positive effects produced by students within similar cultural backgrounds or diverse ones? The team members should be fixed or random?Followed by these four questions, after a long time for studying and research, there are four experiments trying to find some answers and providing a few inspirations. The thesis is composed of seven chapters. The first chapter is introduction, introducing the current situation and the aims for research briefly; the second chapter introduces the definition, theoretical foundations and superiorities of group work; the third chapter summarizes the research achievements from abroad and home, especially on effects and effective elements; the fourth chapter exposes the harmful phenomena happened in the classroom frequently, and the reasons for those phenomena; the fifth chapter focuses on the elements effecting group work, including students, teachers and textbooks. There are four experiments aiming directly at four sub-elements in students, which are numbers of group members, language capacity, cultural background and fixed or random group. The sixth chapter is mainly on task-design, including topics, phases of task, evaluation and feedback, a teaching case. In the last chapter, I propose perspectives and countermeasures which based on the analysis and conclusions from the previous chapters...