Investigation And Reflection, "elementary Chinese Elementary School Textbooks In Malaysia

Along with the high-speed spreading of Chinese language all over the world, Chinese language teaching in Malaysia has entered an important developing period. The Chinese people have the second largest population in Malaysia, next to the Malay people themselves. Chinese language teaching is quite important for them, because it is their mother tongue, symbolizing the Chinese culture. With the purpose of inheriting the Chinese culture, the Chinese people in Malaysia have opened a lot of Chinese language schools aiming at the students of Chinese publicity. Along with the rapid economic development, China has been increasingly heightened its position in the world arena, in order to reinforce the all-aspect co-operation with China, the Malaysian government has also gradually popularized the Chinese language, starting to develop Chinese teaching in national primary schools with the main purpose of making every nationality possible to study Chinese language.With the rapid growing of the number of the Chinese language learners, the demand for Chinese language teaching materials is getting higher. In2003, the Ministry of Education of Malaysia released Communicative Chinese, a complete set of Chinese language teaching materials; in2007, the Ministry of Education of Malaysia once again introduced a new set of teaching materials, Chinese for National Primary Schools, replacing Communicative Chinese, that is now still being widely used in national primary schools in Malaysia. Being a native Chinese language teaching material for children, Chinese for National Primary Schools is compiled with the consideration about the topics in which the children are interested, the real life as well as the surrounding environment. Nevertheless, the fact of whether this set of teaching materials is suitable to them is still need to be taken into consideration.Thus, keeping in mind the above-mentioned problem, this thesis attempts to investigate Chinese for National Primary Schools, the most widely-used and influential teaching material in Malaysia. Starting from the point of view of the learners and the teachers, this thesis also tries to raise the discussion about if there are still problems in the compilation of Chinese for National Primary Schools. The thesis consists of five chapters:As the introduction of the thesis. Chapter1explains the background and the meaning of the topic of this research, summarizes related research materials as well as the methods and creative points adopted in this thesis.Chapter2discusses the compiling principle, the concept, and the teaching goals of Chinese for National Primary Schools as well as its contents.Chapter3is the analysis of the contents of Chinese for National Primary Schools, including the sections of grammar items, vocabulary and Chinese characters in this teaching material. The analysis of grammar items is made mainly in terms of grammar points and sentence patterns; the analysis of vocabulary is included with the discussion about the word-choice (substantives and expletives), the practice of use of the localized words as well as the characteristics of the vocabulary instructional design in the material; the analysis of Chinese characters is provided with the descriptions in the following four aspects:the way of Chinese character presenting and their total amount, the stroke number of Chinese characters, the way of Chinese character practicing as well as the concepts and methods of Chinese character teaching.Chapter4is the analysis of the questionnaire survey and the interview reports about the situation of use of Chinese for National Primary Schools. Starting from the point of view (including the information about students and their motivation for studying Chinese) of the students from three national primary schools, according to the analysis of their responses, this chapter mainly analyses the reaction and opinions of the students. The chapter at the same time points out some problems and suggestions about the material that are given by the teachers from the three national primary schools.Chapter5sums up the problems in compiling Chinese for National Primary Schools and its characteristics with providing some considerations and suggestions to it.