A Survey Of The Use Of "New Practical Chinese Textbook" By Adult Learners In The Caribbean

The “New Practical Chinese Reader(NPCR)” textbook is an excellent resource for Chinese teaching.Since its publication,Hanban has unanimously approved and supported its use,crediting this textbook as an outstanding Chinese teaching material.It has been widely used in overseas Confucius Institutes.Although the New Practical Chinese Reader textbook is designed for Chinese language majors,many Confucius Institutes have also selected it as a primary teaching material for non-professional Chinese teaching because of its systematic layout,practicability and applicability.This article intends to conduct a detailed investigation and analysis of the use of NPCR Books 1 and 2 in a non-professional Chinese learning setting in the English-speaking Caribbean.By way of several research methods including questionnaires,personal interviews,quantitative statistics and SPSS data analysis,the results of the study is based on data from two main Confucius Institutes;the Confucius Institute at the University of the West Indies St.Augustine,Trinidad and Tobago and the Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana.This article analyses the students' satisfaction with and suggestions on five sections of the textbook;the evaluation of multimedia and teaching materials of the textbook;and the evaluation of the textbook's practicality,methodology and ability to attract the attention of the learner.Finally,based on a detailed investigation and analysis of the teaching materials,the author puts forward a number of suggestions on the curriculum for Confucius Institutes and on how to use the teaching materials according to the teaching plans and students' study habits.