| Mandarin Primer Being Easy Lessons for Beginners,a textbook on elementary spoken Chinese written by John Ross(1842-1915),missionary from the united Presbyterian church of Scotland,published by Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press in 1877.The book includes three parts: pronunciation,vocabulary,and grammar.And this dissertation shall firstly lead a special study on the writer,the background of the accomplishment of the book and the teaching contents,mainly focusing on analyzing its teaching of pinyin system,lexis,and grammar to detect its teaching methods and specialties.In addition,this paper hopes to gather more information about the characteristics of priests learning and teaching Chinese during this period through the study of John Ross and his textbook..The first chapter expatiates the significance of the selected topic.Then the introduction of the historical and the current research of British missionaries Sinology and John Ross and his works,the theories,methods adopted as well as the sources of the references shall be showed in this chapter.The second chapter is an overview of the life experiences of John Ross and his works,along with the background and the arrangement of style of the textbook that was published mainly for the zero-based Chinese learners.The book was concise and practical.Besides,it tried to use the "short and fast" teaching concept in the aspects of Chinese phonetic teaching,vocabulary teaching and grammar teaching.John Rose was influenced to have the book be based on spoken language and be used by direct imitation as well as follow the the principle of sentence and gradualityThe third chapter shall analyze its teaching of pinyin system.The system was developed by John Rose according to his Chinese learning and teaching experiences on the Wade-Giles-system.This chapter explains in detail how Rohan has made adjustments to the finals and if these adjustments are acceptable? In order to finger out the characteristics of the Rose's Pinyin system,I compare it with Wade's system detailedly.Besides,the method and characteristics of Rose 's tone and rhythm teaching also were introduced in this chapter.Chapter Four is about lexis.This paper analyzes the characteristics of Rose 's vocabulary teaching,arranging.John Rose adopts the design of Chinese characters,Romanesque pinyin and English interpretation in the textbook.It closely follows the readers' needs,selects the more practical spoken words,and adopts the annotation method of "word" first.The English interpretation is simple and clear.There was also an appendix set up after the textbook for vocabulary expansion and retrieval.The fifth chapter analyzes the grammar teaching of the book.the characteristics of Rose's grammar teaching were summarized in this chapter from the perspective of lexical and syntactic.He relied on the English grammar framework to interpret the Chinese grammatical features.And he also used translation,exemplification,and comparative methods to explain Chinese grammar in detail.In view of the difficulty in learning Chinese grammar,he elaborated a special content in the textbook.The teaching emphasizes the practical function of grammar and weakens the teaching of theoretical grammar.The sixth chapter is the summary chapter.This chapter evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the book.The book is clearly defined and the topic selection is rich and varied,the corpus is fresh and sufficient,the vocabulary selection is authentic and practical,and the appendix is used to expand the inspection,the grammar teaching methods are diverse,and the learning process focuses on repeated imitation and drill.However,the phonetic teaching of the book is simple,and the word class labeling of some words in the appendix makes it easy for students to confuse the usage of the word. |
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