Study Of Character Design In Primary Spoken Chinese Textbooks

In the International Chinese education,the study of Spoken Chinese is an important part of Chinese learning and also the key to master the daily communication in Chinese for international students.Elementary oral Chinese textbooks are very important for oral Chinese beginner.The information,relationship,activities and speaking of characters in the textbooks are closely related to the dialogues in the textbooks.Therefore,character design is very important for the compilation of oral Chinese Textbooks.In addition,the words and actions of the characters in the textbook reflect their culture,and the dialogues of the characters in different countries reflect the communication between cultures.Furthermore,the characters in the textbooks are the important part and cultural symbol to show people and national image,carry out cross-cultural communication and mutual learning among civilizations.In this paper,the data statistics method is used to collate the information of character design and text content changes in different editions of textbooks.Aiming at the latest editions of two sets of textbooks,text analysis and comparison method are adopted to study the five important elements of character design,namely appearance,character,character relationship,character activity and speaking of characters,and make a contemporaneous comparison.Through the diachronic and contemporaneous research,I compare and evaluate the character design to make suggestions for further improvement of the character design.Through the research,I found that the character design of the two textbooks has been relatively mature,but there are still defects.In terms of character discourse setting,the two textbooks lay too much emphasis on the portrayal of foreign characters,and the portrayal of Chinese characters is relatively insufficient.In addition,the character design in the two textbooks is cartoonish,which will affect the international students’ judgment of the age of the characters in the textbooks.In Elementary Speaking Course of Developing Chinese,the communication places of many characters’ dialogues are not clear,which will lead to the error of foreign students’ judgment about the dialogue scenes,and thus make inappropriate language use in reality.These character design defects will affect the students’ impression of the characters in the textbook,and also bring adverse effects to the students’ oral Chinese learning.Therefore,this paper thinks that editors should pay more attention to portray Chinese characters than foreign characters.In the dialogue of characters,the editor can integrate the possible "cultural conflicts" of characters from different cultural backgrounds into the dialogues of the textbook,so that international students can perceive the cultural differences between different countries in advance when learning oral Chinese,so that they can deal with the cultural differences more easily.In the setting of character activities,the editor needs to clarify the communication scenes,so as to reduce the obstacles for learners to perceive the dialogue and understand the meaning of the dialogue.In terms of character discourse setting,editors can try to integrate the vivid foreign characters and Chinese stories of foreign characters into textbooks,so as to attract the attention of foreign students and stimulate their internal motivation to learn oral Chinese.Through the in-depth analysis of the character design in oral Chinese textbooks,this paper tries to provide suggestions for the character design of oral Chinese textbooks,and help editors improve the character design of oral Chinese textbooks,so as to make the characters in the textbook more closely combined with the conversation,so as to make oral Chinese textbooks more perfect and produce a better use effect in practice.