A Case Study Of The Communicative Orientation And Features In Integrated Chinese Course For International Students Based On COLT

The Integrated Chinese Course(ICC)is a compulsory language course for foreign students studying in China.It plays an important role in helping students improve their Chinese proficiency and strengthen their understanding of Chinese culture.Its teaching quality has a direct impact on Chinese learners' learning effect.Classroom communication status is one of the essential factors that affects learning effect.Therefore,it is necessary to study the classroom communication status of ICC.Previous literature shows that there are obviously few researches about communication and interaction in ICC for international students in China.Moreover,there are a small number of researchers on the Chinese classroom communication from the aspect of communicative orientation and communicative feature.Therefore,this study is an attempt to do research in this aspect.Through personally participating in four Integrated Chinese language classes of different language levels,the author tried to experience,observe and record the verbal interaction between teacher and students,and between or among students,describe and analyze the classroom communication in four types of Integrated Chinese classes.After the description and analysis of the communication status of these Chinese classes,some suggestions for the problems existing in the classroom teaching of ICC are proposed.As to the process of the study,a method of case study was used.Firstly,anone-semester participant observation was conducted with the aid of the classroom observation scale named Communicative Orientation Language Teaching(COLT),created by Nina Spada,Maria Fr?hlich & Patrick Allen(1995).The purpose was to learn about the real classroom interaction situation.The recordings of four classrooms were transcribed into the text corpora.Through coding and calculating the text corpora,this research got an overall picture of the communicative orientation and communicative features of the four types of classes.Then,in-depth interviews were conducted to four teachers and eight international students so as to have a better understanding of the effect of teacher-student language and teacher-student interaction.Last,at the end of the semester,a feedback questionnaire was issued to the students to get their reflections on classroom communication.After sorting,summarizing and comparing all collected data,the author finds that :(1)According to the evaluation standard of communicative orientation set by Nina Spada in classroom research,the overall communicative orientation of the Integrated Chinese Course in the observed classes is at a medium level,and the intermediate and advanced Chinese classes are more communicative than the elementary one.(2)Teachers' use of Chinese in classroom teaching is more than 96% in all observed classes.Among them,the teacher who teaches students with zero-based level Chinese achieved effective classroom communication through body language,in-kind materials,and rich classroom activities.(3)A harmonious and open classroom atmosphere will facilitate to increase the proportion of student's sustainable turn-takings in elementary,intermediate,and advanced Chinese classes.(4)When teachers put forward a large number of questions in class but the proportion of referential question is too low,it is not conducive to the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence.