汉语国际教育专业硕士语法教学能力评价: 基于对五位汉硕生趋向补语教学视频的剖析

Abstract

In 2007, mainland China established 24 master programs in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (MTCSOL). MTCSOL is targeted to cultivate high-level applicability and versatile talents in learners who can adapt to the Chinese language international promotion task and are competent to use Chinese language as a second language or foreign language for teaching purposes. The importance of cultivating high-quality teachers is now universally recognized in the Chinese language teaching field; however, there are still a lot of problems that need to be solved. With regard to MTCSOL candidates, scant attention has been paid to the articulating and monitoring of the achievement of graduate outcomes. The present study tries to fill in this gap by assessing MTCSOL candidates’ grammar teaching abilities. Teaching ability is the core element to attain no matter how researchers define the ability of foreign language teachers. It is even so in a traditional language teaching context where explicit grammar teaching preserves its dominant position. As a preliminary study, our study focuses only on the grammar teaching abilities of MTCSOL candidates. It aims to find out the developmental outcome of grammar teaching abilities and existing problems for MTCSOL candidates after two or three years’ professional training. Unlike some studies which discuss the abilities or skills of MTCSOL candidates from theoretical perspective or practical perspective, the researchers entered actual language classrooms conducted by MTCSOL candidates and collected reliable evidence to analyze their teaching performance. This study is inspired by Conversation Analysis methodology. Conversation Analysis (CA) was established by American sociologists Harvey Sacks, Immanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It endeavors to discover commonly seen yet unnoticed methods in daily conversation. Today, it has become an interdisciplinary and internationally influential research field. Conversation analysts believe that the only way to study people’s interactions is to record or videotape the interactions that take place in the real world. For conversation analysts, audio, and video recordings (including transcriptions) have an even more important role because they will become shared materials for the entire academic community to study and improve repeatedly and serve as a basis for people to evaluate the validity of researchers’ analyses. Five MTCSOL candidates were selected as the subject of study. They studied at International School of Tongji University since the year of 2017 or 2018, all of them holding the bachelor degree of Teaching Chinese as a second language. Under the normal teaching circumstance, the five MTCSOL candidates taught the same grammar point (the simple directional complement), which was observed and video recorded in real time. The different stages of grammar teaching of the five selected teachers are targeted and compared with the assistance of transcription and teaching principles and methods proposed by language teaching experts and/or researchers. After detailed analysis of teaching videos one by one, we made up the developmental cross-section of grammar teaching abilities of MTCSOL candidates. We found that five selected MTCSOL candidates have much in common during the grammar teaching process. In introductory stage, the general approach is reasonable, but too many materials and examples are introduced. In the explanation stage, syntactic structure is basically accurate but the semantic explanation is insufficient. Besides, the pragmatic and contextual explanations are basically accurate, but not comprehensive enough. In the practice stage, a few monotonous prompting situations were invented and more time is allotted to mechanical drill than communicative practice. Although there exist some limitations (only five subjects and a narrow focus on one simple grammatical point), the findings of this study contribute to a fuller understanding of development of teaching abilities of MTCSOL candidates. More importantly, it utilizes naturally occurring classroom data to assess the development of candidate teachers and can be a valuable supplement to the existing studies on candidate teachers’ professional development from a theoretical perspective or practical perspective. This study may help improve teacher education programs if a more systematic monitoring and assessing mechanism can be integrated into it and more efforts are devoted to cultivating the teaching abilities of MTCSOL candidates. These findings can also shed light on Chinese language description for teaching purposes because grammar teaching entails that candidate teachers are well equipped with abundant semantic and pragmatic grammar structure information. This study informs researchers of specific domains of linguistic information candidate teachers need urgently.