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35II. Образование
Для цитирования: Li Fangfang. Study on Barrier Setting in Intermediate Listening Teaching Materials of Chinese as a Second Language // [Электронный ресурс] URL: http://rectors.altstu.ru/ru/periodical/archiv/2019/1/articles/2_1.pdf
DOI: 10.25712/ASTU.2410-485X.2019.01.007
УДК 81
Study on Barrier Setting in Intermediate Listening Teaching Materials of Chinese as a Second Language
Li Fangfang
Huanggang Normal University, Huanggang City, P. R. China
As an independent language skill, Listening is the difficulty for foreign students to learn Chinese as a foreign language. listening is composed of a series of micro skills. Yang Huiyuan (1996:28-38) summarized eight micro skills from listening: discrimination and analysis ability, memory and storage ability, ability to associate and guess, rapid reflection ability, listening while recording ability, imitation after listening ability, retrieval ability, and summarizing ability. Listening micro skills are an important reference and purpose for setting up barriers in listening teaching materials. It is clearly stipulated in the "Chinese Proficiency Level Standard and Grammar Level Syllabus" that one of the listening standards for intermediate Chinese level is "having the ability of jumping barriers and acquiring the required information". It is of great significance to investigate and analyze the setting of the barriers in the listening teaching materials of Chinese as a foreign language to effectively organize the listening teaching to foreign students and cultivate their listening ability.
1. Definition of listening barrier
In the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, all the factors affecting the smooth progress of listening activities constitute the listening barriers. From learners' perspective, these barriers include: learners' knowledge about the target language (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar knowledge, cultural knowledge, etc.), learners' listening habits and methods, learners' emotional factors(learning motivation, learning attitude, self-confidence and nervous anxiety), and so on. From the perspective of classroom teaching, these barriers include: the method adopted by teachers in listening class, the listening class schedule, the preparation of leading class, and so on. In addition, there are some auxiliary factors, such as the influence of audio equipment, transmission channels and speech environment, which are not included in this paper.
The barriers discussed in this paper mainly refer to the interference information consciously set up by the compilers of listening teaching materials in order to test
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foreign students' listening ability. Foreign students with higher listening level are often able to eliminate the interference very well, while students with poor listening level will be hindered.
2. The selection of intermediate listening teaching materials for Chinese as a foreign language
This paper discusses the barriers set up in the following textbooks:
I «Chinese Listening Course» (second volume), written by Yang Xuemei & Hu Bo, Beijing Language and Culture University Press;
II «Intermediate Chinese Listening Fast-learning Textbook», written by Mao Yue, Beijing Language and Culture University Press;
III «Intermediate Chinese Listening», written by Li Mingqi, Beijing Language and Culture University Press;
IV «New Intermediate Chinese Listening», written by Liu Songhao & Ma Xiuli, Peking University press.
The basis of selection mainly includes the following aspects: firstly, these four textbooks come from Beijing language and culture university press and Peking University press which are the most authoritative and influential publishing houses in the teaching of Chinese as a second language. Secondly, from the time of publication, these four textbooks are relatively new books in the market, and the material selection and question type design reflect the latest research results. The use range of these textbooks is wide with really good word of mouth, while the sales volume is big. Finally, these textbooks are positioned as intermediate textbooks in the book title, or in the compilation of instructions, indicating that they are applicable to foreign students with intermediate Chinese level, which is consistent with the research of this paper. The training tasks of these textbooks include training students' listening skills such as grasping the main information and jumping over barrier ability. The exercise of these textbook refers to the test type of HSK, which can be organically combined with HSK, and is targeted and practical to a certain degree.
3. Method of barrier setting-up
3.1 Listening barrier consisting of language elements
Phonetics, vocabulary, grammar and text are the four elements of language. In the intermediate level, the ways or means of setting up barriers are mainly using the vocabulary and grammar.
3.1.1 Listening barriers caused by vocabulary
New words: new words are the biggest barrier to the listening comprehension of foreigners, but also an important way to consciously set up barriers in the listening textbooks. The listening course not only has the task of skill training, but also has the task of teaching language knowledge, cultural knowledge and expanding students' vocabulary (Li Hongyin, 2001: 95-108). New words is not only an important task in listening class, but also a common and important means to train
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students to overcome barrier. Students learn to jump over new words according to the contexts, the improvement of listening will be a leap.
The amount of new words directly affects the difficulty of listening textbooks. If two or three new words are present in a sentence, the whole sentence is difficult to understand. If students meet too many new words and lack necessary hints, they will be hindered in their understanding and their enthusiasm will be frustrated. At this time, the setting of the listening barrier will be counterproductive and will not be able to test students' ability. According to the research of Huo Shuyan (2003:13), the recording speed of the Intermediate listening textbooks should be controlled between 150 words and 250 words per minute, and the number of new words should be between 10% and 15%. Otherwise, the larger the number of new words and the faster the speed of speech will be huge barriers to students' understanding.
Homophones and words with similar pronunciation: homophones and words with similar pronunciation can easily cause confusion in listening. There are so many homophones and words with similar pronunciation in Chinese that students sometimes cannot keep up with the speed of language as they may think over the meaning of words. Although the context can help the listener to make a choice to some extent, for foreign students, knowledge about the target language is limited, which requires some time to think and choose, and even makes mistakes. Therefore, the barriers of homophones or words with similar pronunciation are often set up to confuse the foreign students and test their listening ability.
Synonyms and words with similar meaning: the task of vocabulary teaching is to train students' ability to recognize, distinguish, choose and use words. In intermediate level, students' vocabulary gradually enriches, and synonyms and words with similar meaning become more and more. The discrimination of these words should depend on the context to the greatest extent, and not only on isolated words. Depending on context, students' understanding to synonyms and words with similar meaning can be strengthened through specific semantic analysis. Using the similarity between these words to set up certain barrier in listening can test students' mastery to words.
The meaning of words: it includes the barriers caused by multiple meanings of one word and literal meaning. Without a certain context, the meanings of many words in Chinese tend to be more than one. When entering a specific context, the meanings of words can be fixed. Listening is a process that combines the received speech signal with the listener's experience. In the foreign students' experience, the commonly used meanings tend to be extracted first. In this way, there will be interference between several meanings, which need to be constantly checked and corrected in the process of listening. So it is also a common way to use this phenomenon of multiple meanings in listening textbooks to test foreign students' mastery to new words.
The meanings of some words in Chinese are not simply the sum of literal meanings. When foreign students encounter these words, they are often disturbed by
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literal meanings. For example, " (You don't have the
talent to be an athlete)" When many students hear this word"^4" (Its literal meaning is material), they will immediately think of the materials or wood they have learned in their daily life, which will create barrier to understanding. If we give enough context, the understanding of such words is no longer difficult. For example,
f^^^—M, body constitution is so bad that you don't
have the talent to be an athlete)", Through the analysis to the adjacent words of "^4", we can find that " ^" no longer refers to materials but is used to comment on whether a person has the talent in a certain field. The resolution of such barriers in listening depends not only on the context, but also on the mastery of words and the accumulation of the culture of the target language.
3.1.2 Listening barriers caused by grammar
Functional Words: Teachers engaged in teaching Chinese as a foreign language share the same feeling. Over half of the grammatical errors that foreigners make in learning Chinese are due to functional words (Li Xiaoqi, 2005:1-5) . In addition, there is still a serious "fossilization" phenomenon in foreign students' learning to function words. In intermediate listening textbooks, the barriers made by functional words take a large proportion.
In functional words, adverbs are difficult to grasp for foreign students. The abstract meanings of adverbs in modifying verbs and adjectives, such as situation, degree, frequency and mood, are often involved in listening. There are many adverbs with similar meanings and subtle differences in Chinese, which are often compared and explained in pairs. For example, ffi/^, S/X,
/ ^ , ^ / ^^ etc. These words are very common in listening textbooks and
Common collocation: This kind of collocation reflects the inherent relevance between the grammatical units, the orderliness and logic of sentences. But the collocation is not unchanged, and it only reflects the general direction of discourse development. Taking the preposition structure as an example, the collocations behind preposition are often "^M^/^HM" and
M ^ / ^ ^ ". Taking the verb-object structure as an example, one of the characteristics of modern Chinese word order is that all modifiers are placed in front of the modified central word except complement. If the object of a verb has many modifiers, such a verb-object structure becomes a far-apart collocation. In this type of structures, a single word generally does not constitute a listening barrier, but the changes of grammatical meaning and sentence structure caused by these collocations pose certain barriers in listening and are difficult for foreign students to understand.
Conjunctive word: many Chinese conjunctive words appear in pairs. This pair of conjunctive words have the effect of "distant reference" and creates a "psychological expectation" to the listeners. In addition to mastering the
HSK.
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corresponding conjunctive words, foreign students must also grasp the logical relations between the clauses: adversative relation, negative relation, conditional relation, progressive relation, alternative relation, coordinative relation and so on. This logical relations and the speaker's attitude are often used to test students' listening ability in listening.
Sentence: Using various special sentence patterns to create listening barrier, such as rhetorical questions, double negative sentences, etc., which are implicit sentences in Chinese. They are mainly divided into the following categories: surface affirmation is actually negative, surface negation is actually positives, double negation expresses affirmation, affirmation before negation, negation before affirmation. The speaker often uses the inconsistency between the form and the content to confuse the listeners. In order to understand the meaning of a sentence accurately, the listener needs to eliminate the interference of the superficial form. Such special sentence patterns also include tE and W sentences in Chinese.
The length of sentence also affects the listener's reception of information. Short sentences sound easy to understand, while long sentences and complex sentences sound difficult. Generally speaking, the longer a sentence is, the more information it provides, the heavier the task for the listener to receive information in a limited time, and the greater the possibility of information omission.
3.2 Listening barrier caused by context
The essence of listening is the process of receiving and decoding speech signals with auditory organs. In the process of decoding, the listener connects the received information with the known information in his mind, searches for the relevant information that can connect the old and new information, and achieves the contextual effect. Then, he infers according to the relationship between the discourse and the context, and then understands the discourse and achieves successful communication. The listener's reasoning is based on decoding, and it is also inseparable from the participation of context. Only when sufficient contextual effects are obtained, can the inference be successful.
Speech communication is highly dependent on context. Students 'familiarity with contextual scenes, the limitation of contexts and various intimation, and the authenticity and nature of language environment directly affect the difficulty of listening. Ma Yanhua (1999:125-131) made a survey, thinking that "ambiguous context" is the biggest interference factor in listening. Some of the contextual scenes are not well understood by foreign students, and some contexts lack clear limits on the words to be guessed or revelation or necessary semantic repetition. Therefore, it is difficult for foreign students to grasp the associative clues of guessing. Even if they hear every word of a sentence clearly, if they can't understand the sentence in a certain context, it will also lead to the deviation of semantic understanding in a certain context. Some of the content is often omitted with context and this also cause listening barrier.
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3.3 Listening barrier caused by rhetoric
The fundamental purpose of teaching Chinese as a foreign language is to cultivate students' language competence and language communicative competence. In communicative competence, the core competence is to correctly understand and appropriately express in a certain context. Correct understanding and proper expression are inseparable from grammatical and rhetorical ability. Grammar often shows rules through static analysis, while rhetoric pursues more precise, specific and effective expression. The rhetoric in Chinese is rich and varied, and among them, metaphor, irony and style and style are the three most common ways to set up barriers in listening. Metaphor is a rhetoric that uses one thing for another. The key to correctly judge metaphor in listening is to find out the features of the vehicle quickly, and then use them to understand the characteristics of ontology of the metaphor. Irony is the use of words contrary to the original intention to express the original intention, it offers criticism or belittles under the cover of praise or neutrality. Thus the listener should pay more attention to the speaker's real thoughts and attitudes in listening. The requirement of listening textbooks in style is to reflect the authenticity as much as possible. At this time, the linguistic elements with strong oral Chinese will inevitably appear, such as the changes of accent, pause, tone and intonation. The rich connotation reflected by these linguistic elements is the difficulty of listening for foreign students. Because speakers often use these linguistic elements to emphasize an important part of a sentence or to express a deep meaning. In addition, some technical and literary styles have fixed formats and idiomatic expressions, and these contexts are unfamiliar to foreign students. Therefore, this kind of language style is a barrier and difficulty in listening.
3.4 Listening barrier caused by culture
Language and culture are closely related. It is impossible to truly master a language without knowing its culture, history and customs. In teaching Chinese as a foreign language, the influence of cultural differences, that is, the social and cultural knowledge, lifestyle, customs and etiquette, values and outlook on life, is profound and plays a crucial role in improving students' listening. Many students understand the meaning of each word and the grammatical structure of the sentence in listening training, but the meaning of the whole sentence is still not clear. These difficulties are often related to the knowledge of social and cultural background. For example, in Chinese, there are "southerners", "northerners", "orientals" and "westerners". Foreign students without corresponding culture will be confused. Some words, idioms and idiomatic expressions containing allusions in Chinese have rich cultural connotations and embody the thinking characteristics and expression habits of the Chinese people. Without understanding these expressions and their cultural connotations, it is no doubt that they cannot be understood. For example, if you do not know Xi Shi is one of the four beauties in China, you cannot understand the meaning of (look like Xi Shi)". This kind of barrier set up in the
listening reflects the dual function of skill training and knowledge teaching in the
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listening course. In intermediate listening, the topics discussed touch on all aspects of daily life, and these contents contain profound cultural background knowledge. Therefore, it is a common way to use students' mastery of cultural background knowledge to set up barrier.
3.5 Listening barrier caused by pragmatics
In practical communication, the meaning of the discourse itself is sometimes different from the actual meaning expressed by the speaker. It is necessary to figure out the real meaning of the speech through the superficial meaning of the sentence, and to explain the deep meaning of the speech and the implication. The use of such twists and turns to disturb students is a common way to test students' ability in listening. It requires students to make certain derivations of pragmatic principles to accurately understand the meaning of the speaker.
3.6 Listening barrier caused by other factors
Listening barrier caused by information omission: according to the economic principle of language expression, a large number of omissions exist in discourse. Especially in listening, the materials are characterized by vivid language, short sentence structure, less conjunctive words, more rhetorical questions, concise answers, and a lot of ellipsis. Students need to supplement the omission and deduce the conclusion through their own cognition.
Listening barrier caused by information redundancy: the process of discourse understanding is also a process of reasoning. Redundant information in discourse can disrupt the listener's thinking and attention and reduce the relationship between important informations.
Listening barrier caused by information omission multi-role: multi-role speaking is often used to create barrier in listening conversations. Even in non-conversational listening, the characters involved are often multiple. For example, in some narrative styles, the listening content is relatively long, and there are many quantifiers, personal names, place names, time words and azimuth words, which require foreign students to quickly identify the relationship between the characters, the location, the orientation of the surrounding objects and the time of the event. In some argumentation styles, the speaker usually expounds his or her views from different angles in order to clarify his or her views. Listening materials often use these multi-role, multi-clue interference to test foreign students' ability to distinguish and analyze.
Listening barrier caused by the actions already taken or not done: Chinese is different from indo-european languages, which lacks strict morphological changes, and the expressions of grammatical categories such as "time" and "style" are not as obvious as the indo-european language. For foreign students, it is difficult to perceive these grammatical categories. In listening, it is necessary to distinguish the way and state of action. Generally speaking, giving advice, making a wish, and making a hypothesis contain the meaning that the action has not occurred.
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4. Suggestions to international students
Many barriers in listening relate to students' knowledge, understanding to cultural differences and listening habits, therefore, to overcome these barriers, efforts should be made at least from the following aspects: widely involved in social and cultural life, such as newspapers, magazines, films, the Internet, etc., from which to obtain knowledge of politics, economy, science and technology and various disciplines, expand the knowledge storage and accumulation of target language. Consciously learn and understand China's social culture, lifestyle, customs and etiquette, values and other aspects, through the comparison of cultural similarities and differences, to strengthen the sensitivity and adaptability to cultural differences. Develop a good listening habit, that is, use the target language to think, listen and remember, summarize, use context and own knowledge and experience to make judgment, grasp the key information in listening and so on, and improve listening ability.
References
1. Yang, H. Y. (1996). Chinese Listening Teaching Method. Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.
2. Liu, X.(1997). An Introduction to Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.
3. Li, H. Y. (2001). Recognition of Chinese Listening Teaching. Collection of Research Papers on Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and Teaching Materials, 95-108.
4. Yang, H. Y. (1998). 81 Methods of Listening Training, Beijing: Modern Press.
5. Huo, S. Y. (2003). Experimental Study on the Effects of Speed and Word Density on the Listening Comprehension of Intermediate International Students. Excellent Master's Thesis of Beijing Language and Culture University.
6. Li , X. Q. (2005).Notes of Modern Chinese Function Words. Beijing: Beijing University Press.
7. Ma,Y. H. (1999). Conditions for the Realization of Linstening Barrier for Intermediate Chinese Level Overseas Students. Beijing: Journal of Peking University, Vol. 5, 125-131.
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