Idioms In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Language is the carrier of culture and there are a lot of idiomatic expressions in anylanguage. Chinese idiom is an important language vocabulary unit with a strong national colorsand distinctive cultural connotations. As a quite common language phenomenon in Chinesecommunication, it becomes a great difficult for foreign learners, specifically for seniorinternational students, because of its distinctive symbolism and metaphorical meaning. TheHSK test is also often related to the subject of idioms, so it is very important for seniorinternational students to learn Chinese idioms. Based on the previous studies, it surveys andanalyzes the current acquisition of idioms through the questionnaire of senior internationalstudents and the interview survey of some foreign language teachers in Shandong NormalUniversity. This article has carried on comprehensive thinking of Chinese idioms teachingmethods in order to provide the reference for the later teaching.The main contents of this paper are:The first part points out the significance of the study from two angles of idioms itself andteaching. It summarizes and analyzes the previous research according to three aspects of thedefinition, understanding and teaching, investigates the status quo and problems of teachingChinese idioms. It also makes a brief introduction of the research content and methods andselects30high-frequency idioms from Chinese examination syllabus, textbooks and CCL as theresearch corpus.The second chapter is about the design of the questionnaire and analysis of the surveyresults. Considering the comprehensiveness of the study, the questionnaire is designed into twokinds of respectively on international students and Chinese teachers to obtain some corpus andinformation. This part makes detailed statistics of each part of the questionnaire, and does abrief analysis.The third chapter generalizes the main types of bias in learning Chinese idioms as aforeign language based on the results of investigation, including semantic bias, grammatical bias and pragmatic bias, illustrated with some specific sentences. Then it makes detailedanalysis of mainly influencing factors of idioms acquisition bias from four aspects: complexcharacteristics of Chinese idioms itself (including complex rational meaning, distinctive colormeaning, fixity and flexibility of the syntactic structures, restriction of the context); negativetransfer of mother tongue culture (including national psychology, religion, values); individualfactors of learners (including familiarity, learning attitude, learning strategies); teaching factors,(including lack of attention, lack of plan in teaching process and unreasonable compilation ofteaching materials).The fourth chapter puts forward some teaching strategies and auxiliary teaching proposalon the basis of the first two parts of the paper. According to Chinese vocabulary teaching theory,the classroom teaching is divided into three stages: introduction, explanation and practice, withthe design of appropriate teaching methods for each stage. There are also two teachingsuggestions about establishing of the idiom dictionary of international students and textbookwritten, to provide a reference for future teaching.The last part is the epilogue of this paper. It mainly summarizes the conclusions of thestudy, then points out the limitations on the selection of corpus and respondents and someproblems during the survey. Finally, it makes some suggestions for the future study.