Investigation And Research On The Usage Of The Chinese Elementary Comprehensive Textbook ‘Chinese Course’ In Thailand Universities

With the development of economic and cultural exchanges between China and Thailand, and the so-called " Chinese fever " booming in Thailand, According to a report from the Thai ministry of education official: “As of August 2009, Thailand has 1610 schools starting Chinese language courses, and the number of students learning Chinese has reached a total of 508000”. There are three main elements of classroom teaching: students, teachers and the textbooks themselves. Among them, the teaching materials play the role of a bridge, connecting teachers and students together.Thailand has a variety of Chinese textbooks, each with its own characteristics, and some of them are edited by Thai educators; some editors and publishers are from other countries/regions such as Chinese mainland, Singapore and Chinese Taiwan Some other textbooks are organized by local schools’ teachers, who then adapt the contents to suit different levels and conditions. According to statistics, currently the most widely used book in college Chinese teaching in Thailand is ‘Chinese Course’, edited by Jizhou Yang. Following research ideas to promote the development of Chinese language education in Thailand,this paper made a conclusion on improving Chinese teaching materials using effective written comments and suggestions as guidance, according to the research and analysis of ‘Chinese Course’, based on scientific theory and teaching practice of teachers and students’ feedback alike.This research analyzes the use of‘Chinese Course’ in Thailand universities mainly from the angle of applicability. First of all, this study used Literature Arrangement method, summarizing the theoretical knowledge of previous works, and adhered to the four main textbook writing principles:pertinence, scientificity, practicabilityand interestingness as theoretical guidance of the study; after that we also provide a deep analysis providing word-count, sentence length, content, and practice problems such as those content in ‘Chinese Course’,by using Data Analysis method; At last, we have Questionnaires, mainly for analyzing the comprehensive teaching material’s use of the ‘Chinese Course’ of freshmen and sophomore Thai students from six universities. In the Thai students’ questionnaire survey, we learn about student’s view on the difficulty of the teaching materials as well as their interest in the book. Although there is no direct relationship between students’ interest in some aspects of the book and the teaching effects, the process is defining references for future writing of Thai Chinese textbooks. Through the Thai University ‘Chinese Course’ teaching material service condition questionnaire, we obtain the survey results as well as a preliminary analysis; we then separately put it together the proposal using various elements of teaching material. And finally, we analyze the Thai students and teachers’ advice to Chinese teaching primary comprehensive solutions.As the survey developed, we found that in the process of learning Chinese, both teachers and students alike feel the‘ Chinese Course ’approach worked, for at a very high rate it helped students improve their level of Chinese language. However, concerning teaching material usage, there are still some opportunities of improvement; through comprehensive data analysis and detailed feedback from the questionnaire survey filled by teachers and students, we found several meaningful possible improvements, detailed as follows: the contents need to relate to the current social practice, providing a new vision of old subjects; increasing Chinese cultural content; providing stylistic rules that can be added in practice in particular situations, and deepen students’ understanding and knowledge; adding comments on complicated word as well as increasing samples of words with more than one meaning or reading pronunciation, so it becomes more conducive for students to memorize and better understand the course. Additionally, it could also have a better effect if there was a Thai version of teaching material aimed directly at Thai students. During class, the exercises could increase the amount of ‘situational’ dialogues, with the aim of improving students’ grammar as well as their pronunciation skills.There is a large number of locals studying Chinese in Thailand, so we feel a high-quality teaching material will not only help students’ learning, but also it will help spread the language in Thailand to promote Chinese culture. We hope that through the study of effective suggestions this paper will become a meaningful reference for the writing of the Chinese teaching material in the future.