Investigation On Exercises Of Elementary Chinese Textbook 《Chinese Today》

Exercise is an important part of teaching material, and also is the major way to strengthen the knowledge of Chinese language learners. This paper’s object is the exercises of the first volume of Chinese comprehensive textbook Chinese Today,which is one of the Chinese textbooks used mostly and commonly in Chile and other Spanish-speaking countries,regions in Latin American.This paper does objectively investigation and statistics on the amount and the styles of the exercises’ questions, meanwhile, through questionnaire,acquires the subjective opinions from this textbook’s main users who are the students in the basic level classes in Confucius Institute of Chile Catholic university. This paper compare and analyze the results from two parts above, discusses the compiling and designing of the exercises in this textbook.In addition,this paper discusses and analyzes about adjusting and designing the exercises through the cases of writer’s actual classes.The first chapter is about the background, theoretical basis, previous studies, the research object,research methods, and several explaining notes for this study. The notes state the statistical standards of measuring the exercises’ amount,the investigational standard of the classification of the exercises,and the explanation of no distinguishing between the exercises from textbook and workbook.The chapter2 investigates and analyzes the exercises’ language knowledge section,which includes 4 parts:the pronunciation,the Chinese character,the vocabulary and the grammar, discusses and summarizes the advantages and inadequacies for improvement in exercises. 1,Pronunciation exercises combines the intensive training and long-term training scientifically; The exercises about the tones which are difficult for Chilean need to increase;Among the mechanical reading loud exercises, there are some interesting designed practicing,yet one of them is reading the Chinese ancient poetry,which is not efficient to operate and not effective in practicing.2,The Chinese character’s practicing styles are few, students need more exercises about training the components and shapes of Chinese characters,also more training to combine the Chinese characters’pronunciation,shape and meaning;The new characters and difficult ones in exercise should be marked with Pinyin.3,The amount of the vocabulary exercise needs to increase,especially the exercise speaking words according to the pictures and the vocabulary collocation; The styles of vocabulary practicing are not plenty enough;Students need exercise training the combination of vocabulary’s shape, pronunciation and meaning.4,Grammar part’s exercise has plenty styles of practicing and more amount of it; The style of imitating sentences and judging sentences, correcting the wrong sentence need to increase the amount properly;The amount of sentence translation exercise needs to decrease properly;The feedbacks from students show that diverse practicing style of one grammar item makes the training more effective,on the contrary, less effective.The chapter3 investigates and analyzes the language skill exercise section,research methods and analysis procedures are the same with chapter2. Language skill exercises of this textbook more incline to strengthen the listening and speaking skills,which fits the needs of students, the feedbacks show that the exercises of the two above skills training are effective,but the exercises of reading and composing skills need to improve properly;For reasons of national culture and national character,Chilean students are more interested in the practicing style situational conversation and performance,which should be increased properly in this textbook;The questionnaire result shows that students more incline to choose the following styles of practicing language skills, such as:more forms of situational conversation exercises, playing games in Chinese, playing riddles, repeating the sentence after listening; Language skill exercise should be arranged at the last part of all the exercises in each lesson, practicing skills after accumulating enough language knowledge should be more effective.The chapter4 analyzes two cases of actual practicing classes.Questionnaires show that the teacher’s adjustment is more needed in pronunciation practicing class and language skill practicing class, this chapter exemplifies two cases which are initials discrimination practicing class and oral practicing class with card game. First,this chapter introduces the background of the case;Second,describes the process and the pattern of the class; At last, discusses and analyzes the adjustment,organization and design for an interesting and effective practicing class should refer to the Chilean culture background,the learning characteristics and the traits of Chilean students.Exercise is the most important way to strengthen the information for the second language learning,but relevant research is still in its early stage of development,writer hopes this paper can provide reference recommendations to the compilers and researchers of Chinese textbook.