Investigation And Analysis On Pause Teaching In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Pause, along with other suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation, make the speech flow rhythmical. Proper pause can not only provide the necessary air supplement, but also highlight the semantic and emotion focuses in the sentences. The "non-native" accent of Chinese learners is largely because they cannot handle those suprasegmental features correctly. This practical problem should be attached by the TCFL researchers. Thus, this article investigated and analyzed the teaching materials, conceptions of teachers and students, and the ability of foreign students to make pause in reading, to research the current situation of the pause teaching in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL). This article has four chapters.The first chapter reviewed the studies of function and classification of pause, and TCFL-related pause research. Combining with previous research, from the perspective of TCFL, we divided pause into four classes:zero pause, structure pause, rhythm pause and pragmatical pause.The second chapter analyzed two sets of widely used TCFL teaching materials. The result shows that both teaching materials systems are having defects in pause teaching.The third chapter includes two parts. First, we interviewed 10 experienced Chinese teachers from the international college of CCNU. Most teachers indicated that pause teaching is unnecessary, pause is a part of language intuition, it cannot be taught. Then, we selected 30 foreign students from the international college of CCNU, including 10 students at intermediate stage,10 students at advanced stage, and 10 Master of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (MTCSOL) students, to participate in a reading experiment and an interview about pause. The experiment shows that pause errors are very common. The later interview however, shows that few students can proactively learning the pattern of pause in Chinese, but some of them suggest that pause knowledge should be introduced by teachers.The last chapter summarized the research results above, and provided some suggestions of systemic pause teaching, for pause teaching in TCFL and language sense cultivation needs to be proceeded gradually in proper sequence.