Introduction

The elementary spoken Chinese course aims at international students with little basis of Chinese to apply correct Chinese pronunciation, tone, vocabulary, grammar and other elements to spoken communication, focusing on the essence “speaking”.

Aims and Tasks

Cultivating students’ Chinese speaking ability is the main task of this course. Practicing is the only way to communicate with a second language learner. 

1. Discourse comprehension

2. Information grasping

3. Questioning

4. Conversation

5. Expressing in paragraph 

Contents and Requirements

The Elementary Spoken Chinese Course lasts for one academic year. (4 class hours per week, 4 credits in total). 

Teaching Contents

1. Vocabulary: Vocabulary is the base of conversation. In a speaking course, the best way of teaching vocabulary is to teach during the conversation. Also, the color difference between oral and written vocabulary should be distinguished.

2. Conversation: The central of spoken courses. During the conversation learning, students are required to relearn and consolidate the usage of words and grammars (learned in the integrated course) in specific contexts, and to learn proper manners of speaking.

3. Notes for words: These notes show the key words, grammars and backgrounds of the text, which are essential to a good comprehension.

4. Exercises: Vocabulary, integrated, situation and other exercises. Aiming at consolidating the new words and new grammars just learnt and draw inferences about them.

5. Cultural background: The difference of national cultures lies in the different ways of language expression. The teacher should give a brief introduction of the relevant cultural background, for fewer occurrences of language barriers or improper expressive manners among students.

Teaching Requirements

1. Accuracy. The accuracy of speaking should be prior to the fluency. During the exercises, the teacher should keep a normal speed as 150 words per minute.

2. Specificity. With the help of real contexts, pictures and objects, the teacher should provide students with some hints and instructions to stimulate their expressive desires, and then instruct them to make natural and proper sentences.

3. Practicality. The teacher should give detailed explanations and more exercises, motivating students to actively take part in conversations and guaranteeing their equal opportunities.

4. Communicativeness. Foreign students usually firstly study speaking and later communicate. It is much essential for students to master practical and proper communicative sentences.

5. Pragmatism. The spoken and written Chinese are quite different. The teacher should focus on teaching students most practical knowledge and skills, like the differences among expressions with different tones, stress and moods.

Teaching Steps and Methods

· Teaching Steps

1. Introduction of topics of speaking.

2. Explanation of new words.

3. Explanation texts and key words usages.

1)  Read after teacher and learn the text in the whole. (This step can be skipped if students previewed).

2)  Situation recreation: let better students make dialogues to display the text.

3)  Communication practicing: Students in groups make conversations in roles, with the teacher’s instruction.

4)  Further exercises: Pick current topics or according to the teaching tools, teacher raises questions for students.

5)  Key words and language points should be explained during the conversation or separately. 

· Teaching methods

1. Teacher demonstration

2. Student imitation

3. Group practicing of students

4. Teacher questioning

5. Scenarios Simulation

6. Subjects varying

7. Express in Free Paragraph  

Test for the Intermediate Spoken Course

1. Test principle: This is a course results test, not for testing language level, while will also reflect the listening and speaking abilities of students. The test items are mainly about the content of the course, and students are required to speak naturally with correct pronunciation, tones and grammar, and with fluency and appropriateness. The scores of this test, in principle, should not be above 90.

2. Types of the Test

1) Read aloud the texts

2) Quick answer

3) Read a short essay and retell the text

4) speaking ( Topic speech for one  student, topic conversation for a pair)

5) Passage speaking according to the given word

3. Test form

Prepare three equal-level test papers, A, B and C, and students randomly choose one. Students will be given 5 minutes to prepare.

4. Scoring method

Generally, there must be at least two spoken Chinese teachers scoring in the test.  Marks of each part will be given according to the criterion of the test mark sheet, and the final score comes from the marks’ combination according to a certain formula.