An Analysis Of The Thailand Elementary Chinese Comprehensive Textbook "Learning Chinese With Fun"

With the rapid growth of China's economy and the continuous improvement of its international status,the global "China fever" is continuing to level up.The number of people learning Chinese is growing.As an important support for teaching activities,Teaching materials serve a critical role as well as a link between class organizations and daily learning programmes.Thailand is now one of the major counties where "China Fever" has been showing up,and so large amount of Chinese textbooks are in demand.Now books written by Chinese and Thais or Thais themselves are emerging rapidly in markets.During my teaching periods in primary and secondary schools in Thailand,I used the "Learning Chinese with Fun”,a textbook written by Thais to teach my students.Most of them are kids and teenagers.During my teaching,I found several defects in this book.Therefore,I made up my decision to make this textbook as my research subject,taking the advantage of the "Case Study and Statistical Analysis".In my research,based the following four reference standards: "the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet","Basic Principles for Chinese Phonetic Alphabet ","A Graded Syllabus of Chinese Proficiency Vocabulary and Characters" and "Standards for Mandarin Chinese Proficiency and Outline of Chinese Grammar" while combining with the principles of normalization,pertinence,practicability and interest,I mainly studied the book's structure,contents,pronunciations of Chinese Pinyin and characters,vocabularies,grammars as well as exercises to conduct a comprehensive inspection and analysis.Through the analysis of teaching materials,I believe that the "Learning Chinese with Fun" follows the "4-C" Principles of Thai's Foreign Language Teaching in Basic Education.Based on the communicative function and the cultures of the two nations,the textbook uses Chinese language as the medium to link other subjects.And its knowledge points are basically based on daily Chinese communications.Viewing the structure,I find the author firstly sets a part of Chinese Pinyin learning,then follows vocabulary learning,grammars and texts containing interesting and colourful pictures with degrees going up step by step.However,what's not convenient is that the workbook and the textbook are divided into two pieces,which is very detrimental for the learners to practice the knowledge gained.In the aspects of text and cultural,the selection of materials is relevant to learners' age,interests and lives.Contents are very enjoyable,practical and well-directed,which are very attractive to students.But the texts are not carefully written in fully standard Chinese.For example,certain amount of mistakes can be found in pronunciations,punctuations and grammars.In terms of Pinyin and pronunciations,the textbook are not written in accordance with the requirements of the "the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet" and "Basic Principles for Chinese Phonetic Alphabet ".Instead,having considered the readers' age,the order of learning has been broken into parts.Meanwhile,the soft tone and the modified tone have been cancelled.Although in this way can learners understand and accept voice knowledge and spelling rules,lots of problems occur in spellings and pronunciations of vocabularies and texts.As for vocabularies,most of them are related to the learners' country,ages,lives and learning,which makes the vocabulary item highly targeted,practical and interesting.However,there are some shortcomings such as the inclusion of too hard vocabularies,the excessive use of hard words and the absence of properties of new words.In the grammar point,the textbook tracks the writing standards of the "Chinese Proficiency Level Standards and Grammar Level Outline" provided for primary learners.Basically the grammar points included are in the Class A,expect for several number of grammar points in Class C,D and Super Class.However,as for those difficulties,there're no specific sections for students to learn.At the meantime,grammatical item structures are arranged in a muddle.Repeated points are obvious.All these help contents to increase into a relatively high degree.Finally,the workbook.It's closely related to the textbook knowledge points,full of fun and diversities and the exercises are moderate in quantity and suitable in level growth,which fit the correspondent users.However,some exercises are superfluous and do not meet the required training purposes and should be cut.