Erhua In Elementary School Chinese Textbooks

Erhua is considered as one of the important research projects in the language and characters normalization in modern times. It is known that Erhua, with its disorderly and irregular situation, has been a potential problem for the popularization of mandarin and elementary language teaching and learning.This paper selects five sets of elementary school Chinese textbooks as the object of study. They are made by different public houses, including People’s Education Public House, Chinese Public House, Jiangsu Education Public House, Hebei Public House and Hunan Public House. By using the ACCESS database, this paper attempts to carefully observe and study how Erhua is applied in different sets of Chinese textbooks, which is to find out those differences and those hidden problems and offer some useful advice to the normalization of Erhua in elementary education.The first chapter is a general introduction mainly about the cause of this study, the present academic researches and the purpose, object and the methods of this study. The second chapter focuses on the writing mode of Erhua in five different sets of Chinese textbooks. As for the writing mode of Erhua, which contains Pinyin and character writing, only Chinese Publish House uses a standardized way of writing. The third chapter is a comprehensive observance and statistic analysis about Erhuaci in five sets of Chinese textbooks. As for the total number of Erhuaci, by making several data forms, different sets of textbooks demonstrate significant differences. Bidu Erhuaci also shows the disorder. The forth chapter attempts to establish a standardized Erhuaci list with the basis of the corpus derived from the textbooks and other established authorized reference books, like Modern Chinese Dictionary. The fifth chapter is to observe how Erhua is applied in the exercises in the textbooks and offer some advice for the Erhua normalization in textbook writing and design. The sixth chapter is a conclusion. It briefly sums up the main points of the paper and also points out some shortcomings of this paper. Finally, the appendix is a detailed statistical result of the frequency and distribution of Erhuaci.