A Comparative Study Between "Chinese For Science And Technology" And "An Elementary Course In Scientific Chinese"

With the improvement of China’s international status and the dissemination of Chinese culture, students who majoring in science and technology choose to study in China is getting increased. Foreign students will benefit a lot from the context and the culture of the target language country. What’s more, textbooks play an important role in the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Therefore, choosing a kind of textbooks that are right for foreign students will help them adapt to the major lessons in the university easily and quickly. According to the data of the Global Chinese Teaching Material E-library, among the 1351 kinds of textbooks of teaching Chinese as a foreign language that have been republished, there are only 15 kinds of Scientific Chinese textbooks. It is not difficult to find that there is only a small number of kinds of textbooks, which are also uneven in quality, designed for the foreign students of science and technology. Therefore, it is urgent to write a set of high-quality textbooks to meet the science and engineering students’needs.This paper compares two mainstream textbooks currently used in science and engineering students—"Chinese for Science and Technology" and "An Elementary Course in Scientific Chinese". Based on the theory of modern Chinese and the second language teaching theory and learning theory, and guided by the contrastive analysis theory, this article will compare the two kinds of textbooks from the overall as well as from the micro.First of all, this paper will introduce the definition of Scientific Chinese and the reason why the Scientific Chinese textbooks have been researched.Secondly, the two kinds of textbooks will be compared from the macro, including intentions, principles, ideas, target users, period distribution, and texts.Finally, the two textbooks will be compared from the micro, including vocabulary, grammar and exercises to summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of textbook. The conclusions which will help the writers pay much attention to some problems in the process of textbook compilation and will make contribution to the future textbooks of Scientific Chinese.