The Investigation And Analysis Of The Exercise Of Two Intermediate Writing Textbooks Of Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

The intermediate level textbooks of Chinese As A Foreign Language which aimsat intermediate level Chinese learners mainly focus on the exercises of writing,one of the crucial language skills. Exercise is a key part of intermediate leveltextbooks of Chinese As A Foreign Language and its design directly relates to theusing results.This paper selects two writing textbooks which are widely used in severalcolleges at present. Regarding the exercises as the target, we study on thecharacteristics of quantities, types and content of the exercises by applying themethods of data collecting, comparative analysis. According to the three-levelwriting goal of "The Curriculum of General Outline for International ChineseTeaching","Teaching Syllabus for College Long-term Foreign Students "and Prof. ZHAOJinming’s evaluation standards for textbooks of Chinese As A Foreign Language. Themain results as follows:First, in terms of the quantities of questions, we counted the total numbersof questions of basic language exercises and writing skills exercises in these twosets of textbooks as well as average quantities of questions per unit. Then,comparative analysis was conducted. It can be concluded that these two sets oftextbooks highly emphasized on the exercises of sentences and discourse. And it isreasonable to arrange the exercises of lexicons and sentences in this ratio. Butthe ratios of discourse exercises need to improve between the same set of textbooks. The former did not apply this kind of classified statistical and analytical methodaiming at analysis of writing textbooks.Second, with regard to the types of questions, there are9types and12typesof these two textbooks respectively. Also, we made a comparative analysis on thecategories of questions, common types of questions and the frequency of use. Theresults suggest that there are some similarities and differences between this twosets of textbooks. For the similarities, both of these textbooks take into accountbasic knowledge of the language and writing skills practices on the arrangement ofexercises; there are not only traditional types of questions, such as blank filling,short answer and writing, but also new and practical types, such as selectioncomparison and survey report. For the differences, Developing Chinese generally usesrelatively traditional questions with fixed answers in basic language practice andproposition writing in discourse practice; while, Experiencing Chinese usesrelatively innovative questions types with not many fixed answers in basic languagepractice but many group discussion in discourse writing section.Third, on the part of content of writing skills exercises, we studied thecontent of paragraph’s exercises as well as discourse’s. Then we analyzedemphatically on the topics of discourse exercises, genre’s alternatives and to whatextend the discourse exercises consistent with the model passages. It also can beconcluded that there are similarities and disparities. From the perspective ofsimilarities, both of these sets of textbooks arrange the topics and genres witha step-by-step approach. The disparities lie in the fact that the writing topicsof Developing Chinese tend to close to practical lives of foreign students; thepoints of focus vary from one to another: Experiencing Chinese mainly focus onexpository and argumentative, while Developing Chinese centers on appliedcomposition. Meanwhile, the previous studies did not address this part.In the end, based on the results from this paper, we put forward several piecesof suggestions on textbook compilation and some problems that we need to payattention during the studies of TCFL textbook’s exercises in order to attract theacademic attention to the compilation of writing textbooks.