Study On The Oral Chinese Textbook Spoken Chinese Used By American Soldiers During The Second World War

Textbook is quite important in teaching activities,and a good one could help improve the effect and efficiency for both teachers' teaching and students' learning.Currently in the area of teaching Chinese as a second language,there are already a lot of researches about modern Chinese textbooks.By contrast,studies on older Chinese textbooks are few,and among which quantitative analyses are even fewer.Hence,according to the characteristics of Spoken Chinese,an oral Chinese textbook for American soldiers during WWII,this study has combined qualitative and quantitative analyses.With a thorough research on the arrangement of its phonetics,vocabulary,grammar points,texts,exercises and review units,Spoken Chinese has proved itself the research value in the area of global Chinese textbooks' history.Meanwhile,this paper also has summarized some useful suggestions for modern textbooks' compiling and Chinese teaching.First,this paper introduced its compiling background,authors' information and compiling structure,and so on.We found that it played a great role in Chinese teaching for American soldiers during WWII,and also made a far-reaching influence on the Chinese textbooks' compiling and Chinese teaching of the USA and Japan after the war.Further,through the quantitative analysis on its phonetics,vocabulary,grammar points and brief study on its texts,exercises,review units,we've got some findings as follows:First,Spoken Chinese has relatively conformed to the army method and considered learners' characteristics and their acquisition order,and put this principle into practice during compiling so as to help them learn step by step.Moreover,it has repeated and practiced those important and difficult language points in an appropriate interval,so that learners could transfer their short-term memory into longer memory and master what have learned.Second,it has actually maximized its role as transformation media,in the way of flexibly merging teaching methods,transforming them into learning and practicing methods that could be used by learners themselves,and enabling learners to be the main part of language learning.Third,it has not only presented the structural linguistics theory,but also made the materials scientific,targeting,practical and interesting,which has enabled it to be a successful oral textbook at that time.Beyond that,its way of appropriately applying the newest linguistics theories into textbook and teaching is still worthy of our attention at present.