A Contrastive Analysis Of The Topic Of Chinese Textbooks For Children

Children’s Chinese teaching education is an important part of Chinese International Education, and is critical to the development of Chinese International Education. Children from different countries have their own unique language, cultural background, learning habits and learning characteristics. Thus the preparation of a highly targeted children Chinese language teaching materials is particularly important for children.In this paper, I selected two sets of nationalized Chinese textbooks, "Hanyu Dingguagua" and "Experiencing Chinese", as the object of my study, using literature method, comparative from a global perspective and database analysis methods, from the "country characteristics" and "children" angles, to explore the topic design characteristics of Children’s Chinese teaching textbooks.The second chapter, based on the previous research and combine with the principles and features of nationalized Chinese teaching textbooks, I designed a topic category template, including eight categories of topics":"Personal Information", "Knowledge","Daily Life", "School life","Family life", "Interpersonal Communication", "Chinese Culture and Customs" and "National Culture and Customs".Combined with the social and cultural background of Japan and Thailand, it makes the classification and statistics of topics of these two books. This passage compared the occurrence number, proportion, difficulty and order of every topic and subclass topic in these two books. In these two textbooks, the two most frequently occurred topics are "Knowledge" and "Life". Except the topic "Culture and Customs", the proportion of each categories of topic is approximate. The differences is that in "Hanyu Dingguagua", the teaching materials are more abundant, the number of occurrence subcategories topics totaled 267 times, and the teaching materials focus on reflecting the characteristics of the country, the topics about "Chinese and Japanese culture and customs" co-occur 36 times. And the "Experiencing Chinese" textbook content is relatively simple, most text is presented with illustrations boxes, the total number of the subcategories topics appear 174 times, topics related to "Chinese culture and customs" co-occurs 11 times, and few about "Thai culture and customs" of subcategories topic appear.Chapters III and IV of this article, with the above data, this essay further analysis the two features, "Children" and "Country characteristics", of these two textbooks on the topic design. I found two materials’ topics design paying more attention to the cognitive development of children. First, using topics "Knowledge" and "Information" to guide children from self-awareness and awareness of others begin to understand the world. Topic "Life" selected subclass topics close to the children’s daily lives. Topic "Interpersonal communication" will focus on practicality and functionality, selecting those simple communication language children using in their daily lives. The difference is that, in "Experiencing Chinese", topic "Life" contained more topics related to daily life, and few about" family life" and "school life". About "Country Charactertics", "Hanyu Dingguagua" concerning the "Chinese and Japanese culture and customs" subcategories topic is very rich, involving the "clothing", "food", "festival" and others, embodying the characteristics of two cultures. The "Experiencing Chinese" only described "Chinese culture" in some subclasses topics, such as "festivals" and "restaurants". And there are few topics in "Thai culture and customs". As can be seen, "Hanyu Dingguagua" better reflects the country-specified materials.The fifth chapter on the basis of the above analysis and previous studies, comments are made for children’s Chinese teaching textbooks. Chinese textbooks for children should focus on the cognitive development of children consistent with the children’s learning characteristics and laws. Topics should be close to the daily lives of children, and blend in the two countries customs and culture to reflect the national characteristics of materials, achieve better teaching results.