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Abstracts Section I: Teaching Chinese Language
I1: Teaching Chinese Language (Schedule)
Bellassen, Joel (chair)
Sun, Lam: Some Difficulties
in the Acquisition of Chinese Characters and the Use of Calligraphy
as a "Therapy"
Rovira-Esteva, Sara: The
Cognitive Perspective in Teaching Chinese Measure Words
Allanic, Bernard: The
Teaching of Characters and Reading Comprehension Proficiency
Huang, Hong: The Textbook
Evaluation of the Original Laoqida: from the Point of View
of Business Chinese
ABSTRACTS
I1: Teaching Chinese Language
Bellassen, Joel (chair)
Sun, Lam: Some Difficulties in the Acquisition of Chinese Characters and the Use of Calligraphy as a "Therapy"
For many of our students, starting to write Chinese for the
first time is a “big event” in their experience. They are confronted to a very
different writing, in its visual form, its spatial organization and density, as
well as its kinesthetic execution. We say that writing the Chinese characters
involves several mechanisms: the perception of the form either seen or imagined
in the mind, the motor sequence, the management of the space, the coherence of
the vision and the hand, and all these mixed capacities should become a natural
embodiment after many hours of practice so that we are not only be able to copy
correctly a character but also take the programmed chain of movement sequence
as a via for memorizing and for recalling.
We suppose that after some time, almost all the students can finally master the
writing skill. But if this process is left to the students themselves who are
busy learning how to pronounce, how to compose a phrase and how to write
simultaneously, the time will probably take long. On the other hand, the method
of presenting the characters in the order of the necessity of oral
communication is not favorable for a gradual, logic and rational understanding
of the Chinese writing system. In the class, the teacher is engaged in
instructing other language skills rather than worrying about the performance of
each student in their writing, and the evaluation of their handwriting is
mostly given from the static result rather than the process how it is written.
As a result, about 30% percent of the beginners show difficulties, such as in
the single stroke orientation, or in order of the stroke sequence, or in the
spatial manipulation. Some others show difficulties in giving attention to
details while copying a character. All these problems lead to a week
performance in active production (recalling).
For correcting some wrong writing habits, we use calligraphy as a method for
treating these beginners within the first 40 hours of learning. This practice
takes the following steps:
1. Observe closely the writing performance of each of the students. Once
problems are found, the teacher will try to find out if their difficulties are
due to the failure of kinesthetic processing or spatial processing, or merely
“poor concentration”;
2. Invite them for the regular practice of calligraphy. Each case is given
specific characters, written in front of each one, as models for specific
problems. The teacher will “drive” the student hand by hand to copy once, then
he is to repeat by himself;
3. Encourage the student to analyze the structure and the rules, to reflect on
their own problem and to be conscious in following the rule strictly, for each
single brush, as well as in the organization of the whole character.
4. After 10 sessions (20 hours), the students will make a self evaluation of
their own progress.
Most of these students can overcome the difficulties within a short time. From
this experience, we found that a quick modification in Chinese writing for the
beginners can be provided by the practice of calligraphy. Some results will be
shown and reflections will be made in this paper.
Rovira-Esteva, Sara: The Cognitive Perspective in Teaching Chinese Measure Words
Our starting point in this paper is that the traditional
approach used for the teaching of Chinese measure words is misleading and has
failed to achieve the goals of teaching, since the mastering of Chinese measure
words is felt to be a difficult aspect of Chinese grammar for both teachers and
students. This sense of difficulty is due to a variety of factors.
First, members within a given category of a Chinese measure word seem to have
little or no connection among them, since for most categories there are almost
no explanations for their semantic motivation. Second, we too often forget that
this Chinese system of linguistic classification is a flexible one, and poses
many questions to the traditional view, which promotes the idea of one-to-one
concordance, i.e. each noun has its own classifier. And last, but not least,
when carrying out a contrastive study, we often conclude that measure words
cannot be translated, but it does not matter, since “they bear no meaning”.
Following the work of Tai & Wang (1990) on a study of the classifier tiao,
an increasing number of papers concerning the subject of Chinese measure words
and human categorization have been published. This recent research is based on
the principles of cognitive linguistics and concludes that Chinese measure
words are not an arbitrary linguistic device, but represent an interesting type
of human categorization which needs further study. We believe that the new
approach provided by cognitive linguistics is optimal for solving most problems
and difficulties concerning the teaching and learning of Chinese measure
words., i.e. consistency of categories, concordance, classification,
translation, their discursive and pragmatic role, etc.
Allanic, Bernard: The Teaching of Characters and Reading Comprehension Proficiency
he analysis of the main school books used in China for
nearly 2000 years for the teaching of chinese language at elementary level
reveals the same pedagogical principle : an intensive training for the
recognition of approximately 1500 basic characters, which is explained by the
fact that as occcidentals have to learn the 26 letters of the alphabetic
alphabet, chinese learners need to be trained to recognise the most useful
characters before learning to read. Based upon the hypothesis that this
principle can be transfered to the teaching of chinese as a foreign language,
we have elaborated a list of the 1440 most useful characters for foreign
students who wish to reach quickly the first level of reading comprehension of
authentic Chinese documents. These 1440 basic characters come from the
comparison of five previous statistic of characters' frequency in ordinary
publications and others previous basic teaching programs for foreigners.
We have then made a few statistic surveys of the frequency of the characters
used in some newspapers or litterary novels. They have revealed that these 1440
basic characters cover nearly 95 % of all the characters employed in these
publications, which therefore proves the scientific value of this list and
confirms our hypothesis.
Huang, Hong: The Textbook Evaluation of the Original Laoqida: from the Point of View of Business Chinese
当《原本老乞大》2002年在北京由外研社出版后，随之而来的是语言学界对这本目前为止最早的《老乞大》版本的语音学、语法学、方言学或社会语言学等方面的研究，而真正从汉语教学特别是教材分析的角度对《原本老乞大》的研究却相对较少。这一事实说明国内对外汉语教学界对于早期外国人汉语学习史的忽视。本文试图从商务汉语的视角来分析《原本老乞大》作为一本口语教材的特点，追溯六百多年前的一部汉语教材在近五百年的时间里流传不衰的原因，从而为当前的商务汉语教材提供借鉴。作者认为《原本老乞大》的编写有明确的为商人服务的目的，有清晰的人物关系和基本结构，有适应各种情境的对话，有巧妙穿插的词汇，还有对中国人生活方式、习俗的介绍以及成语俗语的引用，其作为教材的成就令人惊叹。作者还认为，如果中国对外汉语教学界拓宽学术视阈，加强对国外汉学和汉语教学界的了解，从外国人早期汉语学习的历史中去发掘汉语教学的前车之鉴、经验和成果，对外汉语教学的研究和实践将会避免重复劳动，达到新的起点。
When the Original Laoqida republished in 2002 by Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press in Beijing, the excited responding to this nearly 700 years old
textbook for teaching Chinese to Koreans, is mainly from the circle of the
Chinese linguists, but not the circle of TCFL. This tells the truth that the
early history of teaching and learning Chinese in other parts of the world has
been long ignoring by the TCFL circle in China.
This paper is to evaluate Original Laoqida from the point of view of Business
Chinese, and analyses the special features of this textbook, so to understand
why had it been very popular in about 500 years. As a textbook, it has a very
clear purpose, a very good structure, many well-arranged dialogues and useful
words, and even pays a good attention to the Chinese customs, idioms and common
sayings. Used by businessmen at that time, it has reached a marvelous standard
from the point of view of Business Chinese.
The reason we analyses this successful textbook or this kind of teaching
materials is to explore the possibility to learn from the early stage of the
Chinese language teaching and learning outside of China. If the circle of TCFL
of China opens up more in this field, the Chinese language teaching and
research will avoid some old roads to ruin and reach a new starting point.
Last update: Jul 21, 2004 (AJ)
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