A Study On Appropriate Discourse Of Listening And Speaking Textbooks At The Primary Stage

The primary task of teaching Chinese as a foreign language is to cultivate the four basic skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing.The ultimate goal is to cultivate students’ Chinese communicative ability,which means,through a certain period of study,learners can choose an appropriate way of expression according to specific communicative context,successfully complete the communicative task,and achieve the expected communicative effect.The essence of cultivating learners’ ability to use appropriate expressions in daily communication is to cultivate the appropriateness of students’ verbal expression.At present,the teaching activities in teaching of Chinese as a foreign language,focus on teaching basic Chinese knowledge and training students’ basic language skills in listening,speaking,reading,and writing,and pay more attention on basic pronunciation,vocabulary,and grammar.In other words,teaching activities will focus more on the cultivation of Chinese language ability,while the appropriateness of the learners’ communicative language is often overlooked.For zero-based foreign students,they have never learned Chinese before and have anxiety about Chinese language learning.When faced with textbooks,the first-hand material of learning,the students are easily to depend on the textbooks.Because of this dependence,the listening and speaking textbooks that undertake the communicative function occupies an important position in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.A high-quality listening and speaking textbook can provide the students with most of the source of corpus and open channels for communication.It is said that the content arrangement of teaching materials also affects whether students can efficiently integrate into daily communication,and affects the continuity of students’ interest in learning.For the construction of the subject of Chinese as a foreign language,reasonable textbooks should not only impart language knowledge to students,but also present the real communication styles of the Chinese people.They should not compile textbooks for the sake of compiling textbooks,which leads to rigid textbook dialogue content.Such compiled textbooks are not good for teaching and learning.Therefore,it is necessary to study the appropriateness in the language of the listening and speaking textbooks in the primary stage.This thesis selects the four types listening and speaking textbooks which are most widely used for the primary stage as the research objects: two textbooks from Developing Chinese series: Elementary Spoken Language I and Elementary Spoken Language II,two from Boya Chinese series: Elementary Beginning Chapter I and "Elementary Beginning Chapter II,and New Practical Chinese Textbook 1" and "Contemporary Chinese Textbook 1" which integrate listening,speaking,reading and writing.Based on the principle of verbal communication appropriateness the thesis examines whether the communicative dialogues in the six textbooks are appropriate,analyzes the reasons for their inappropriateness,summarizes and analyzes the reasons for the inappropriate speech in the four different textbooks,and proposes corresponding textbook compilation suggestions based on the existing problems.Some communicative dialogues are modified for reference.Through investigation and analysis,it is concluded that in Developing Chinese Elementary Spoken Chinese I,the proportion of texts with inappropriate dialogues is the highest as 36% and the proportions of inappropriate phenomena in Boya Chinese Elementary Beginning Chapter I,Boya Chinese Elementary Beginning Chapter II,New Practical Chinese Textbook 1 and Contemporary Chinese Textbook 1 are not much different,which are 17%,14%,18% and 19% respectively.In Developing Chinese Elementary Spoken Chinese II,inappropriate dialogues are accounted for the least,which is 6.5%.The reasons for its impropriety are mainly as follows: verbal communication violates the relevant principles of verbal appropriateness,such as the "polite principle","coordination principle","cooperation principle","relationship principle","role principle",etc.;verbal communication dialogue is not clear and has ambiguity;the content of the dialogue in the teaching material is outdated;the logic of the communicative dialogue is poor,and the dialogue is formed forcefully for practicing grammar;sentences in the teaching material do not conform to the Chinese speaking habits;"sorry" and "excuse me" uses confusion etc.In response to the above problems in the textbooks,the corresponding textbook compilation suggestions are put forward: the issue of verbal communication appropriateness should be incorporated into the overall design of Chinese teaching before compiling the textbooks;the dialogues should conform to the authentic Chinese expression habits and be close to their real life when compiling textbooks;the dialogues in language communication should be in line with the identity of both parties;the contents of the textbooks should be continuously adjusted to remove outdated texts and increase hot topics in China;the texts on festival cultural topics should be increased;the story should be grandly structured and capable profoundly reflect society when writing dialogues;the pragmatic elements should be appropriately add in the textbook dialogue to show the international students the universality of verbal communication and the special rules in the context of traditional Chinese culture;the mother-tongue-culture model should be get rid of in the textbook and the communicative-language culture model should be adopt.