A Study On Textbooks In The Context Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

With the increasing enrollment of Chinese classes overseas, more and more experts suggest the necessity of designing materials specially assigned to a certain country or region. On the other hand, the education system in the U.S. allows each individual school and instructor to choose their textbooks for themselves, which provides a demand for the textbooks designed for America here in China.However, the actual use of textbooks seems far more complicated and goes beyond a simple supply-and-demand chain. After promoting a few textbooks to the international market, to the writer's disappointment, the books received much criticism. Years of experience and expertise in designing Chinese textbooks for foreign students seem to fail when being applied to another country other than China. What are the possible causes regarding this failure? Based upon the Chinese teaching and learning context in the U.S., this paper will examine the differences between the textbooks written in China for a U.S. audience and those written in the U.S. for its local audience. Following that will be suggestions for future textbook development.This paper, first of all, defines the two Chinese learning settings and their major characteristics, that is, Chinese as a Second Language setting and Chinese as a Foreign Language setting. It analyses the two settings with a qualitative methodology within three dimensions—the socio-lingual, the educational and the individual dimensions. It then examines how these factors restrain the development of textbooks written for the audience in the United States.Ensued is an argument that within the same TCFL setting, differences are still noticeable, both in theory and in practice, between locally written textbooks in the U.S. and those written in China for a U.S. audience. This paper samples two of the most prominent textbooks of their kinds, Integrated Chinese written in the U.S. for its local audience, and New Practical Chinese Reader written in China for the audience in U.S. The two samples are compared to discover the differences from two perspective—one of the designer, the other of the user. With both qualitative and quantitative analyses, it concludes the similarities and differences between these two types of textbooks on aspects such as their linguistic difficulty, cultural setting and exercise designs. It then summarizes the up-to-date experiences of writing textbooks for the U.S. audience, and suggests the current problems that those written in China for a U.S. audience likely to present. This paper also supplements its research with interviews with the learners/textbook users, in an attempt to explore their psychological perception of learning Chinese and the Chinese textbooks, and to search for suggestions from their perspectives.The paper's final attempt is to conclude the principles and designing guidelines for textbooks for an American audience, i.e., to integrate the characteristics of Chinese teaching and learning in the U.S., to be oriented toward the American students and to be guided by the teachers' needs in America. It suggests the current margins of researches and possible topics for future explorations. Hopefully this paper presents some new perspectives in future development of textbooks, especially assists the collaborative efforts in writing textbooks between experts from both China and the U.S.