An Analysis Of Characters And Words Of Elementary Chinese Textbook “yuwen” Published By People’s Education Press

With the help of "Chinese teaching assistant" software, this paper analyzed the characters and words in the elementary Chinese textbook “Yuwen” published by the PEP. We analyzed their numbers, grades, difficulty and frequency of usage, and discovered that:1. New characters. “Yuwen” has a total of 3502 new characters. 96.28% of them belong to the Chinese curriculum standards of compulsory education. There are 93 new characters which are not included. In addition, there are 1095 characters in “Yuwen” which exceed the “standard”.The average number of new characters in each volume of “Yuwen” is 291.83. The new characters distribution in each volume and chapter is uneven; this arrangement is inappropriate.In terms of the new characters’ difficulty, “Yuwen” has 2704 new characters included in A,B, C, D four character grades of HSK. There are 798 characters not belonging to the four character grades of HSK. The difficulty coefficient of the new characters is 6888.5, while the average number of the difficulty coefficient in each volume is 574.04. The difficulty of the new characters in each volume shows an inclination to decrease along with the increase of volume numbers(difficult at first, but getting easier later). The difficulty of the new characters in each volume and each chapter is also uneven.In terms of the frequency of usage, most characters in this textbook generally have high frequency of usage. Besides, the higher the volume numbers, the lower the characters’ frequency of usage.By analyzing the "new characters lists" of “Yuwen”, we discovered that there’s a gap between its statistic data and the data obtained in this paper.2. New words. “Yuwen” has 9683 new words, each volume has 806.91 new words. The new words in each volume, each chapter has the problem of uneven distribution and irregular arrangement.In terms of new words’ difficulty, “Yuwen” has 5368 new words included in A, B, C, D four word grades of HSK. There are 4315 words not belonging to the four word grades of HSK. The difficulty of the words in each volume and chapter is uneven, the difficulty differs greatly.In terms of the frequency of usage, the words in this textbook generally have a rather lowfrequency of usage. There are only 932 words belonging to range “1-1000”, while there are 4563 words belonging to range “8001+”.The number of new words listed in “Yuwen” is fewer than our data. However, the number of new words is distributed evenly in each volume and chapter. But the the arrangement of the words in "read and memorize", "read and write" sections is inconsistent.3. Some suggestions on using this textbook: As a second language teaching material,“Yuwen” should be used with caution in overseas schools, and we should also consider various factors while using it, such as the needs of local teaching, the characteristics of the students etc,.