Modern Chinese as a Foreign Language
A Practical Course for American Students
Ming Chao Gui
University of Oklahoma
The book is considered by the author the “rich fruit” of his language teaching experience for 39 years, including 14 years of teaching modern Chinese as a foreign language at the universities in the United States.
The fundamental differences between teaching and learning Modern Chinese as a foreign language and as a native language have been a brand new topic in the past decade or so when the status of the Chinese language has been changing rapidly and the demand for this language has been increasing dramatically in the face of the globalization of the world’s economy and the growing influence of China to the world in many aspects and fields.
The book, written from the perspective of teaching and learning modern Chinese as a foreign language, is intended for American students studying the Chinese language, especially those who want to become a teacher of the language. Beginning learners with some basic knowledge of the language will also benefit from this book.
This practical course book not only gives the readers the basic yet essential knowledge of the grammar of the language on different levels of its linguistic hierarchy when learned as a foreign language, but also discloses and discusses in detail the fundamental differences between learning and teaching modern Chinese as a native language and as a foreign language. It makes it clear that the effective way in acquiring modern Chinese as a foreign language is to learn it in a functional way, in other words, to learn and teach the actual functions of words, phrases, grammatical patterns in context, or sentences, rather than the classifications of words or types of sentences. Comparison to the different features of English is another concept and practice behind all the discussions in this book, which has also been proven to an effective teaching and learning technique in the acquisition of a foreign language.
The author Ming Chao Gui, also the author of three other books on Chinese dialects addressed as his “Trilogy of Chinese Dialects” by LINCOM EUROPA in 2000, 2001 and 2005 respectively, is Associate Professor of Chinese and Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma, Norman campus, Oklahoma, U.S.A. He lived and worked in China from 1946 to 1983 and in the U.S. from 1983 till present. In the past two decades, he has presented over fifty papers on linguistics and Chinese dialects at international conferences in the U.S., China, France, and Sweden and has regular publications on Chinese dialects, teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign language, comparative studies of Chinese and English phonetics, phonology and translation in China, the U.S, and Germany.
ISBN 9783895869440. LINCOM Coursebooks in Linguistics 14. 193pp. 2008. Course discounts available!
