Study On The Overall Design Of Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

This paper focus on the overall design of teaching Chinese as a second language.By analyzing the development of Chinese international education, the authordemonstrates that the key problem is that the so-called “Mandarin fever” is far aheadof the methodological research. An enthusiasm for learning Chinese disguises thecurrent inefficiencies in the teaching of Chinese as a second language.This Mandarinfever itself runs both cold and hot. The Confucius Institute model, which depends onthe promotion of Chinese national administrative power, is seen by Westernmainstream society as a threatening ideological mouthpiece rather than a friendlyculture messenger. Each country in which Chinese is taught, however, has its ownmethod, with lack of unified standards and patterns. From a historical perspective, thediscipline of teaching Chinese as a second language was produced to meet animmediate demand. So from the beginning, the discipline has lacked a scientific basis,and has imitated many English as a second language teaching methods, mainly interms of the framework and methods of structural linguistics in the last century.Thereare several schools of thought in linguistics, including cognitive linguistics andfunctional linguistics, among others, each of which starts from a different theoreticalbasis. Recently some senior scholars have suggested that these methods of teachingChinese as a foreign language can be combined together to become a so-called"three-in-one" method. I have objections to this formulation, because the theoreticalbases for these schools of thought are mutually incompatible, and cannot bereconciled with each other.This paper begins with basic research to investigate the relationship betweenlanguage and thought, the physiological and psychological characteristics of languageacquisition, and language processing by artificial intelligence. Then the characteristicsof Chinese are discussed, including a review of Chinese grammar. In part two, afterdiscussing the main problem of Western research on second language acquisition, theauthor puts forward a hypothesis about human language acquisition, which will bebasis for a new means of Chinese as a second language. The hypothesis maintains thatthere is a primitive cognitive area in the human brain and that this area is a result ofevolution of common genetic regions.It also asserts that this cognitive area can be divided into, but not necessarilylimited to, the following modules: an emotional module (accept refuse silence); asmell and taste bodily sensory module (visual/auditory); an abstract thinking module(generalization/questioning/recognition/reasoning); and a basic language form module,among others. Children discover language using their original cognition, first findingwords to express cognition. Once the language and the original cognition unitcombine, they form a concept primitive (cognitive vocabulary) and become the basisof an individual language vocabulary, which generally does not change over a person’s lifetime. Once children have established their earliest language cognition,they use this language to discover more language. At this time, this newly acquiredlanguage will no longer come in contact with their deep structure cognition.Children’s original cognitive development is a process of intelligent development, andthe development of each module has an order, but the order may be vague and varyfrom person. Both children and adults create language from the perspective ofmeaning, and the creation of grammatical rules is an unconscious automatic process.The basics of all human languages have similarities in form, and this is one of thecommon manifestation of human original cognition and language, which could becalled a basic language syntax. After an individual has mastered a language’s basicgrammar, depending on that individual’s developmental environment, she willconstruct different linguistic forms. These forms all fall under the category oflinguistic rhetoric. After the acquisition of a language, an adult’s original cognitivearea is suppressed or even shut down. Adults use cognitive vocabulary as empiricalsymbols, to communicate and think. Only in the exploration of new knowledge andcompletely unfamiliar territory can an individual’s original cognitive area be triggered.As people learn a second language, their mother tongue will naturally repel the secondlanguage; the second language cannot make contact with the original cognitive area, itand therefore cannot be learned.The solution to this problem is to simulate the original cognitive developmentstage, and to establish a second language as an original cognitive module. Theassumption relies on a person’s innate intelligence mechanism. This assumption isalso the primary basis for an overall design for teaching Chinese as a second language.Through a discussion of Chinese linguistic characteristics, the author asserts thatChinese teaching should deemphasize syntax, and pay more attention to the wordsand word formation. Each Chinese character has a basic meaning, and moving fromcharacter to word is a process of semantic association and combination. Chinese partsof speech can be simplified into the real and the imaginary. The syntax of Chinese canbe simplified as a relationship between words. In a detailed section on teachingmethodology, the author puts forward the goals of Chinese international education,such as lifelong learning, anti-greed education, emphasizing effective input, anti-eliteeducation, establishing diversified evaluation criteria, and so on. The author designs aheuristic teaching framework that include four aspects: learning targets, externalevaluation standards, internal evaluation standards, and implementation. Studentsabsorb limited language information as soon as possible to master the targetlanguage’s basic framework. This basic framework is limited to three aspects: theability to ask questions, to give detailed descriptions of the world, and to expressoneself. The teacher’s role is as a guide, a problem-solver and a communicator. Finally,the author briefly analyzes the international curriculum for Chinese languageeducation, Chinese language proficiency standards, and HSK, and offers somerecommendations.