Research On The Quality Of Conversations In Elementary Spoken Chinese Textbooks Of Short-term Spoken Chinese

Conversations are the core of spoken Chinese textbooks. The quality ofconversations to a large extent affects the quality of spoken textbooks. This paperintends to evaluate the quality of conversations in Short-term Spoken Chinese(elementary level) from three perspectives which are topics, functional items andconversational structure of the conversations in light of Conversation Analysis (CA)and Materials Evaluation.First, comparison is made on topics between textbooks and syllabus. It isdiscovered that topics of the textbooks comply well with that of the elementaryChinese syllabus.(chapter3)Then, comparison is made on functional items between textbooks and YangJizhou’s teaching syllabus (elementary level). It is discovered that those functionalitems are well covered in the textbooks and comply well with that of the elementaryteaching Chinese syllabus. The textbooks cover86items out of117items of thesyllabus reaching74percent. But seven functional items either appear in intermediateand advanced syllabus or exceed syllabus, which means functional items in textbooksare different from syllabus and more difficult.(chapter4)Next, in light of the types of adjacency pairs concluded by Liu Hong(2004), wefind out that the textbook has a good coverage of different types of adjacency pairsdespite of imbalance of their frequency. It also balances well between preferred anddispreferred organizations. Furthermore, the conversations are coherent. However,preferred and dispreferred organizations are not scientifically arranged withappropriate difficulty, which should be valued in the future.(chapter5)Finally, combing Liu Hong’s (2004) and Zhu Xiaoya’s (1996) research onconversational structure, We found that its structure take up various forms andadjacency pairs have the biggest amount topping97.7percent. Overall, the quality of the conversation in the textbooks are quite good, but itstopic, functional items, and conversational coherence remain to be further improved.Due to the limit of time and energy, this paper didn’t cover the compiling order offunctional items or conduct contrastive analysis with other spoken textbooks, whichshould be perspectives for further relevant studies.