A Comparative Study On The Vocabulary Of Chinese Made Easy And Easy Steps To Chinese

This study focuses on two series of Chinese teaching materials—Chinese Made Easy and Easy Steps to Chinese. Both of these two textbooks are popular overseas.The aim of this study is to compare vocabulary amount and level of the two series; also to analyze the Primary-Intermediate transition performance on both two series. The author uses the newly developed website(www.languagedata.net) to process vocabulary data. This study is based on the newest published vocabulary syllabus--The Graded Chinese Syllables, Characters and Words for the Application of Teaching Chinese to the Speakers of Other Languages(2010). By using it, the reliability and validity of this study is guaranteed.The study shows that, in terms of vocabulary only, Easy Steps to Chinese is more suitable to overseas teenager users. The increase of vocabulary amount, level and average sentence length is milder, which means this textbook allows the learner to digest well. As for the Primary-Intermediate transition performance, the design of Easy Steps to Chinese can help teenager learners when they are facing great difficulty from more new difficult words.