Bridging the Gap between Textbook and Reality

Zhongqi Shi  史中琦

 Columbia University  Chinese teacher

论文摘要Paper AbstractOne of the core questions presented in front of every language teacher is What to teach, and this question has usually translated into an ever-growing demand for high quality textbooks. While a large number of Chinese textbooks have been published every year, students’ and teachers’ calls for better textbooks appear never to have waned. Though there are many reasons accounting for users’ dissatisfaction, the lack of practicality in both content and language is most outstanding. In other words, students might spend significant amounts of time learning words and grammar patterns that are actually infrequently used by native speakers of Chinese, and this issue is particularly significant to textbooks designed for special purposes such as business, legal, and medical.

 In responding to the above issue, this presentation attempts to cover two topics. First, we will introduce a textbook development model called PACE based on a proven approach widely used for making new products in business. Published textbooks that were written through the PACE model will be given in order to explicate the specific processes that can be helpful in guiding language teachers to develop their own teaching materials. Second, we will present how we tested the efficiency of a published textbook by examining students’ performance in real world. Students’ verbal speeches were recorded, transcribed, analyzed linguistically and pragmatically, and then compared with the textbook students had used. The overlap and gap between what the textbook covers and what the real world needs was analyzed. Advice for textbook development and instruction will also be given at the end of the presentation.

Through this presentation, we intend to prompt language teachers and researchers to revisit the issue of textbook practicality, making suggestions that can be useful to textbook development. We also hope to send book authors a friendly reminder that they should keep revising their published work to better suit the needs of students and teachers.

 发言人简介Presenter's BioZhongqi Shi: lecturer of East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University. He is the author of several textbooks, including Zhuoyue Hanyu: Gongsi Shizhan (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press), and Understanding China (Peking University Press). His research interests cover student motivation in second language learning, instructional technology in education, and teaching Chinese for special purposes. He is also the director of Columbia’s Business Chinese and Internship program in Shanghai.