The Chinese Language Teaching

Past and Future

Abstract

This paper will first examine and analyze some past experiences of Chinese language teaching, and clarify abilities Chinese language instructors must possess together with relevant problems they encountered. It will also point to achievements of past Chinese language teaching, its great momentum of development, and point out existing problems that can still be seen in the field.
To promote the teaching of the Chinese language, the paper believes it is necessary to first establish correct ideas regarding Chinese language teaching on the part of the leaders down to the broad masses of teachers. Principally, (1) One must be clear that the teaching of Chinese language is an independent discipline, belonging to the field of foreign or second language teaching. It is also interdisciplinary having the teaching of Chinese language and character as its core, and involving many other disciplines. (2) One must be clear that the foundation or what is called the core content of the Chinese language teaching is the teaching of Chinese language and characters. The starting point and the ultimate goal of Chinese language teaching is “how can you in the shortest period of time make a foreign student who is the beginner of Chinese best learn and master the language at the fastest pace?” (3) One must clearly understand and properly deal with the relationship between the teaching of Chinese language and characters and the cultural teaching. (4) It is necessary to establish the concept of “the study on the true essence of the Chinese language teaching”, with a clear understanding that it is not equivalent to “the study on the true essence of the Chinese language” per se. (5) The Chinese language teaching must be under the guidance of scientific research.
The paper also points out that in order to promote the development of Chinese language teaching, one must vigorously carry out the expand studies on the true essence of Chinese language teaching. Thus, concrete analyses and discussions on much needed scientific research tasks are provided as the following: (1) One has to earnestly strengthen the basic research on the Chinese language teaching to effectively solve the question of “多少” (how much, how many), and “哪些” (which); (2) One has to strengthen the study of the use of lexical and syntactic patterns; (3) One has to strengthen the study of “sequencing”; (4) One needs to compile and compose good reading textbooks while advocating a great deal of reading comprehension, and reading aloud; (5) One needs to develop studies on the true essence of Chinese digitalized network teaching.