A Study On The Frequency Statistics Of "the First Language Reading In The World"

With the advent of new-style schools, textbooks have been playing a n increasingly important role in th e communication of traditional Chinese culture. Republic of China was situated in a transi tional period, and th e textbooks in that period were also going through the tran sformation from classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese. So the study on textbooks in the period of Republic of China does not only help to have a good understanding of textbook compilation at that tim e, but also can provide som e reference for th e modern textbook compilation. The present studies and analyses on textbooks in the period of Republic of China are m ainly conducted from the perspectives of phonetics, linguistics, pedagogy, language policy, historical science and etc. However, “the character frequency statistics study” presented in this paper, a research topic with a high level of unfamiliarity, is still at the pioneer stage, sorting and research work of textbooks in the late Qing Dynasty and is in urgent need of being developed and improved.Therefore, the major objectives this paper has fulfilled are as f ollows. A set of textbooks in the period of Republic of China was selected and on the basis of systematic sorting-out of characters used in the set of textbooks, m ethods such as statistics, conclusion, comparison and analysis were carried out on characters used in each volume in order to probe if the use of character in the set of textbo oks accorded with the cognitive laws of elementary school students and at last the exp erience that can be drawn on for the m odern textbook co mpilation was explored in this paper through deciphering the compilation thoughts of the set of textbooks in the period of Republic of China.The paper takes World’s First Chinese Reader(a total of 8 volum es), a set of Chinese textbooks for elementary school students published by Shanghai World Book Company in 1932, as its study object.Firstly, in the aspect of character freque ncy study, the study perspective of this paper included both the synchronic state study in which the character use of the textbooks was com prehensively described from the three entry points of high-frequency characters, one-time used characters and character repetition rate, and the diachronic state study in which a cont rast analysis was operated between the textbooks, the Primary Chinese Reader published by the same compiling team in 1925 and the Modern Chinese Commonly- used Character T able(i.e. 3500 common-used characters). For the approach of the study, this paper, besides the traditional methods such as statistics, conclusion, comparison and etc, also resorted to language materials(i.e. language m aterials of the texts in the textbooks) analysis method and to m eet the demand of writing stud y, a specialized corpus of the set of textbooks was established.Secondly, the textbook illustrations were analyzed from two aspects of quantity and content. Numberly, from the first book to the eighth book,the number of the text illustration showing two decreasing trend and one increasing trend.for the increasing part is the number of total text illus trations and th e exercises illustrations. The Increasing part reflected on the number of the texts without pictures.From the view of content, this series of textbook’s illustrations including Explanatory illustration and scene graph. Illustrations of the first four books are given prior ity to children with their familiar animals, and endow them with the features of anthropomorphic. to fully mobilize the enthusiasm of the child ren to learn; Afte r the fourth book,the illustrations are mainly help the children easily understand the content of the text.At last, in term s of compilation thoughts, the educational thought of “educating the five domains simultaneously” proposed by Cai Yuanpei, was found to be fully integrated in the compiling of the set of textbooks. The design of contents of the texts that involved the aspects of human-oriented thought, patriotism thought and imparting of multiple values, strictly conformed to the metal development laws of the students. The first four volumes depicted things that happened in children’s daily life with the contents of the texts focusing on anim al stories, scenery description and daily conversations and the ideas that w ere meant to be communicated of friendliness, diligence and filial piety were embedded in the texts. In the las t four volumes, the main contents of texts were about historic al stories and typical characters and were intended for edifying and teaching students the idea of love for the country.As the study result shows, the compiling of the textbo oks closely followed th e goals of elementary education in the period of Republic of China. For the choice of character use, it was als o generally consistent with the set scope of Modern Chinese Commonly-used Character T able.In each volume, the am ount of recognized characters was reasonably determ ined and am ount and repetition rate of supplementary characters rationally arranged, satisfying the mental development laws of the students.