Authenticity Research On Comprehensive Textbooks For Elementary Business Chinese

As one of the four major aspects of Chinese language teaching,the development of teaching materials has an important impact on teaching and learning.Authentic teaching materials are crucial to learners' learning.Authenticity is the bridge between the classroom and reality.The more authentic the textbook text is to the real world and the more realistic the communicative activities,the more effective the learning will be.Business Chinese is an important part of international Chinese language teaching.The degree of authenticity of business Chinese teaching materials has a direct impact on teaching effects.Therefore,it is necessary to examine the authenticity of business Chinese teaching materials.this paper has selected two comprehensive primary Business Chinese textbooks,Business Chinese and A Practical Business Chinese Reader,and conducted a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of their text authenticity and task authenticity respectively,according to which some insights into the development of comprehensive primary Business Chinese textbooks are proposed.Specifically,the investigation of the text authenticity is based on Mishan's(2005)3C principles,namely Culture,Currency and Challenge.This paper constructs an analytical framework for the authenticity of Business Chinese textbooks,and analyze the authenticity of their vocabulary,grammar and texts respectively.The results of the study show that the two primary business Chinese textbooks in this paper perform well in terms of vocabulary authenticity,while the grammar and text fail to meet the requirements of authenticity in three aspects:culture,currency and challenge.The investigation of task authenticity was based on Mishan's(2005)three frameworks.Firstly,the communicative purposes of the texts in the two Business Chinese textbooks were analysed according to the Communicative Purpose Description Form.Then,the tasks in the two Business Chinese textbooks were classified according to the task type framework.Finally,the authentic tasks in the two Business Chinese textbooks were specifically classified and described according to the framework of the correspondence between communication purposes and task types.The results of the study show that there are 80 tasks in Business Chinese that meet the communicative purpose,accounting for 4819%,while there are 47 tasks in A Practical Business Chinese Reader that meet the communicative purpose,accounting for 30.32%.The authenticity of the tasks in Business Chinese is slightly higher than that in A Practical Business Chinese Reader.The reason for this is that the tasks in the latter are not well matched to the text.Based on the research of the authenticity of the texts and the authenticity of the tasks,this paper provides some insights into the selection of materials and the design of tasks for the development of a comprehensive textbook of elementary Business Chinese.The selection of materials is suggested in terms of vocabulary,grammar and text,while the design of tasks is suggested in terms of the diversity of tasks,the correspondence between tasks and communication purposes,and new ideas for task design.