A Research On The Compatibility Of Comprehensive Elementary Chinese Textbooks With Affiliated Listeningand Speaking Textbooks

The " Separate Skills " Teaching Model is widely adopted in the teaching of Chinese as a second language in mainland China, which means offering one comprehensive course as the key course while providing specialized courses for different skills (speaking, listening, etc.) using different textbooks, respectively. In actual teaching, however, a prominent fault of this model is the incoordination between different courses. Frequently occurring problems like teaching different courses in the same pattern, staging similar activities, lack of relatedness in content, etc., can greatly reduce the quality of teaching. Such problems are not only due to individual teachers but are also closely related to the compatibility between textbooks.On the current market, there are a great number of comprehensive and separate skills textbook series specially designed for this specific teaching model, but little attention has been paid to compatibility within series. In what aspects is compatibility reflected? How can we improve compatibility between textbooks? What specific approaches and methods can be used? These questions remain unsolved. In order to have a deeper insight into compatibility, this paper will take a close look at elementary comprehensive, speaking and listening textbooks of Developing Chinese. By analyzing existing textbooks, we hope to have a better understanding of compatibility and provide valuable input for future textbook compilation.First, the paper analyzes the characteristics and deficiency in the compatibility of these three textbooks in three aspects:layout, text and exercise. Based on the analysis of the textbooks, the paper then defines the connotation of "compatibility":from an overall perspective, all the textbooks should be unified in structure and style, complete in topics, content and linguistic elements, and balanced in the training of skills. From an individual perspective, each textbook needs to display its peculiarity in accordance with the type of course and amount of overlap, supplementation, or progression in content with other textbooks. Next, the paper discusses how to improve compatibility between textbooks with relevant theories in teaching, learning and cognition. Lastly, the paper tentatively develops criteria for evaluating the compatibility of elementary Chinese comprehensive textbooks with affiliated speaking and listening textbooks, proposing suggestions for improvements to Developing Chinese.