Comparative Analysis Of Old And New 《Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) Syllabus》

HSK is a Chinese version of TOEFL or Tesol taken worldwide, which is a test of Chinese as a foreign language or a second language. HSK was first taken at Beijing Language Institute on Sep.26.1986, and has been an influential testing tool of the Chinese language all over the world since 1991. Every year, more than 100,000 non native speakers of Chinese take HSK, with 2/3 of which consisting of Koreans. In fact, HSK was first carried out in Korea in 1993, and 310 of the 431 candidates successfully acquired this certificate. In 2010, the domestic number of Korean participants reached 53,000. Moreover, up until 2009, HSK was executed 6-7 times a year in Korea. The growing popularity of HSK is due to not only the growing number of students planning to study in China, but also the increasing importance of the HSK certificate for entering foreign language high schools, universities, companies, and receiving promotions.Plenty of experts have pointed out that the former HSK included problems, such as in the aspects of the scoring and grading systems, principles for developing the syllabus of words, and patterns of the problems. Therefore, in order to make a more efficient and appropriate HSK test for the Chinese learners, experts of the Chinese language, educational measurement and evaluation (thesis program) home and abroad, the China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, together released a New HSK test in Nov.2009. This came to be after sufficiently surveying the authentic Chinese language education situations abroad, absorbing the benefits of the former HSK test, and reflecting on the results of recent years of international language test research.Due to the implementation of the new HSK test, which was first taken in Korea in Mar.2010, Korean learners need to understand and prepare for the new version of the test. In addition, teachers must be aware and should alter their teaching models accordingly.The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the methods of language teaching-learning and ideology implied by the New HSK Guidelines, and the new contents and patterns of the test, on which I'd like to propose effective preparation strategies for Korean learners and the direction of teaching-learning and thinking context for Chinese language teachers. Based on the former HSK test research, this thesis includes the analysis of new HSK Guidelines. It also involves the analysis of the former HSK Elementary-Intermediate and corresponding grades of HSK5, on the composition of test contents and problem types (the ratio of the types, the changing aspects of problem patterns, the characteristics of the new patterns, and the comparison of similar patterns) and on the changes of lexical guidelines. Finally, based on this analysis, the methods of teaching and preparation for New HSK5 are presented. I hope this research will be helpful for the compilation of HSK workbooks and the New HSK test preparation classes.