An Exploration of the Application of Optimization Teaching Theory in Effective Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language ()
1. Introduction
Research purpose: With the strengthening of China’s comprehensive national power and the rapid development of its economy, the number of Chinese language learners is increasing day by day, and the international promotion of Chinese language is in full swing. At present, more than 2000 universities in more than 100 countries around the world have offered Chinese language courses, and the number of Chinese language learners is nearly 40 million. The international promotion of the Chinese language is in full swing, which puts higher demands on the quality and efficiency of Chinese language teaching. How to make Chinese language teaching higher quality, more effective and more efficient to meet the needs of the increasing number of Chinese language learners is an issue that every Chinese as a foreign language teacher needs to think about. Therefore, this paper explores the effectiveness of Chinese language teaching on the basis of Babanski’s theory of teaching optimization in order to further improve the quality of teaching and optimize the teaching effect.
Research Methods: Classroom Observation Method: It is mainly to observe the performance of teachers and students in the Chinese as a foreign language classroom by listening to teachers’ lectures and so on. Observations of teachers include: preparation for class, teaching style, use of teaching methods, teaching language, teaching methods and so on. Observations of students include: their state of mind in class, their views on specific topics, their communication after class, and their feedback on the lesson. Teachers’ teaching behavior is an important reflection of teachers’ teaching philosophy and teaching ability. Classroom observation can show teachers’ subjective understanding of effective teaching and students’ real performance in the Chinese as a foreign language classroom.
2. Overview of Babanski’s Theory of Optimization of Teaching Process
Babansky’s theory of optimal teaching was firstly put forward in response to the problems of students’ heavy academic burden, difficult academic work, poor results, and serious boredom in basic education of the Soviet Union at that time, in order to promote learning, improve the teaching situation at that time, and raise the level of teaching. Optimization is not a special teaching method or teaching tool, but a goal-oriented arrangement of the educational process by the teacher on the basis of the laws of teaching and principles of teaching, a conscious, scientifically based choice by the teacher (not a spontaneous, accidental choice), and a scheme for arranging classroom teaching and the entire teaching process that is the best and most suitable for the specific conditions.
This statement emphasizes the importance of teachers’ lesson planning, which refers to knowing in advance the basic situation of the students in the class, including the country, age, and level of the current stage, so as to choose the appropriate teaching content and teaching methods.
2.1. Teaching Content
Teaching content is an important part of the teaching system, and Babanski proposed and explained in detail six guidelines for the optimization of teaching content, i.e.: the guideline for maintaining the integrity of the content; the guideline for the conformity of the components of the content with the scientific and practical values; the guideline for the possibility of the content to be in accordance with the age of the students; the guideline for the number of hours of study of the material to be prescribed by the authorities; the guideline for the conformity with the international experience of designing and selecting relevant guidelines of international experience in designing and selecting the relevant content of upbringing; and guidelines of conformity with the currently available pedagogical methods and material base of the school. These guidelines define the requirements for the content of the teaching on the one hand, and guide the determination of the content on the other.
2.2. Teaching Methods
Teaching method is a general term for the ways, means and procedures of interaction between teaching and learning adopted by teachers and students in the process of teaching to realize the teaching objectives and accomplish the teaching tasks, including the teaching method of teachers and the learning method of students. Therefore, choosing the most effective teaching methods is one of the core parts of the optimization of the teaching process. Optimization of the teaching process requires teachers to choose reasonable teaching methods according to the specific situation. Since teaching methods have dialectical unity, various methods penetrate into each other, are interrelated with each other, and teachers and students interact with each other in various aspects, teachers should choose teaching methods according to the tasks of the corresponding teaching stage, the characteristics of the content of the textbook, the possibilities of the students, as well as the teacher’s proficiency in the use of various methods, and further select the teaching methods. teaching methods, and further optimize the combination of teaching methods and apply them flexibly.
3. The Application of Teaching Process Optimization Theory in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language
There are many factors affecting the effective teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, and this paper mainly discusses them from the point of view of the teacher, who is one of the main subjects in the classroom, and mainly focuses on several aspects of the teacher’s preparation for the lesson.
Superior teaching skills can never rely on impromptu on-the-spot play, but on continuous exploration, long-term accumulation and full preparation, so lesson preparation is one of the important behaviors of teaching, is the prerequisite for teachers to have a good lesson, and is also the guarantee of the smooth progress of the course, if the preparation is ineffective, the teaching is bound to be ineffective.
Teachers in accepting a course of teaching tasks, first of all to study the syllabus, clear course requirements; at the same time to read through the textbook, to understand the characteristics of the whole system of teaching materials and the teaching principles and methods based on. On this basis, a lesson plan is drawn up, including the division of stages, the determination of priorities and the allocation of hours [1].
3.1. Teachers’ Preparation of Lessons by Analyzing Teaching
Materials
Textbook is not the only resource of the curriculum, but it is the most basic curriculum resource, which is a kind of paradigm for guiding students’ cognitive development, life learning and personality construction, and an intermediary for guiding students to know things, analyze things, understand things, and reflect on, criticize and realize the construction of meaning. Therefore, teachers should have a full dialogue with the textbook to understand and master the subject knowledge structure of the textbook, determine the objectives and requirements, and grasp the key points and difficulties to turn the “content of the textbook” into the “content of learning” for the students.
Let’s take the lesson “Where do you live?” from the classic Chinese as a Foreign Language textbook “Approaching Chinese—Elementary Hearing and Speaking” as an example. First of all, the teaching goal of the whole set of teaching materials is to cultivate comprehensive Chinese language skills on the basis of emphasizing oral language. The textbook is mainly aimed at university students who come to China to study Chinese through inter-school exchanges during winter and summer vacations, and the main purpose is short-term teaching [2]. Approaching Chinese is the initial part of the whole set of textbooks, and Approaching Chinese—Beginner’s Listening is the listening textbook in the initial level, which advocates the concept of “leading by listening”, and facilitates learners to cultivate a certain degree of listening ability from the beginning of oral sentences, laying a foundation for recognizing and reading words.
After understanding the textbook and text overview, we also need to determine the key points of the textbook through comparative analysis and bias analysis, and organize the content of the textbook according to the degree of difficulty, reflecting the principle of progressive teaching, so that students are easy to accept. The same to “Where do you live” as an example to analyze. Cultural knowledge that hinders and affects the understanding of the content of the text: the introductory part of the lesson has “the south” and “the north”, which is geographically differentiated by the Qinling-Huai River line. Whether it is the natural conditions, agricultural production methods or geographical features and people’s living customs, there are obvious differences, which need to be explained as a difficult point. To make a prediction of the teaching difficulties in advance is the first step of effective teaching.
3.2. Teachers Analyze the Teaching Object of Lesson Preparation
Lesson preparation is not enough to prepare the material, reflecting the principle of student-centered, must analyze the students who use this material. First of all, it is necessary to understand the general situation, i.e. the current level, learning attitude, classroom performance and culture, and the distribution of the degree of the students in this class; at the same time, it is also necessary to grasp as much as possible the name of each student and the relevant background information, especially the individual factors of affective cognition, such as motivation, attitude, personality, learning strategies, communication strategies, cognitive styles, and so on [3].
Students in a Chinese as a foreign language classroom may come from all over the world, and different native speakers produce different biases in the learning process, so teachers need to know in advance the country-specific situation of the students in the class and make teaching adjustments based on the comparison with the native language. It is almost universally recognized that Chinese characters are difficult to learn, especially for students from non-Chinese speaking cultures. Chinese characters are a completely new writing system, and unlike Pinyin, they are the only ideographs still in use today. In Pinyin, the form and the sound of a character are two in one, and they are linked together with the meaning, combining the form and the meaning by means of the sound, while in Chinese, the form, the sound and the meaning are in a three-pronged situation. The Chinese language is a situation in which form, sound and meaning are in a three-legged race. Therefore, for students from non-Chinese culture circles, learning Chinese characters not only requires the combination of form and sound, but also the combination of form and meaning. As a result of breaking the existing way of thinking, beginners who are accustomed to pinyin characters often regard Chinese characters as “heavenly books”, and each character is an abstract picture to them. Therefore, when teaching Chinese characters, it is necessary to differentiate between students in the Chinese character circle and those in the non-Chinese character circle.
The national psychology of students from different countries varies greatly. Generally speaking, Asian students have high self-esteem and are reluctant to speak up if they are not absolutely sure. European and American students, on the other hand, are more outgoing and active, eager to answer questions in class, enthusiastic and sociable.
Recently, the China Youth Research Center released the “Comparative Research Report on the Study Awareness and Condition of High School Students in China, the United States, Japan and South Korea” (hereinafter referred to as the report), in which a number of indicators reflect the qualities of Chinese high school students in comparison with the other three countries. The survey was implemented twice, in 2009 and 2016, for general high school students in China, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, with sample sizes of 1,868, 1,020, 1,314, and 3,379 students from the four countries surveyed in 2009, and 2,499, 1,540, and 2,015 students surveyed in 2016, 1800 students. One of the surveys was: What do they usually do when they encounter difficulties or questions in their studies? The three highest ranked options for Chinese high school students were “ask classmates or partners” (85.1%), “look up on the Internet” (67.9%), and “ask teachers at school” (66.3%), and these three options were also the highest ranked options for American high school students, but they were all over 80%, with a difference of no more than 3.2 percentage points between them. When encountering difficulties in learning, Chinese high school students chose to seek help from themselves in the highest proportion, with 63.1% “reading and learning by myself”, compared to 57.9%, 45.0% and 24.9% in Korea, Japan and the U.S. respectively; Chinese high school students chose to seek help from their parents in the lowest proportion, with 8.9% “asking parents The proportion of Chinese high school students who chose to seek help from their parents was the lowest, with 8.9% “asking parents”, compared with 58.0%, 14.0% and 13.2% in the United States, South Korea and Japan, respectively. Of course, this is not absolute. When preparing for class, we should determine the questioning methods and teaching techniques according to the different psychology of the students.
In addition, it is necessary to understand students’ motivation, which is one of the most important factors influencing students’ foreign language learning. Teachers can consolidate the motivation by combining external motivation with rewards and praises, for example, preparing some small prizes with Chinese characteristics, so that they can get a surprise after boring learning, which will help to further mobilize their interest in learning.
3.3. Teachers Analyze the Teaching Object of Lesson Preparation
Lesson preparation is not enough to prepare the material, reflecting the principle of student-centered, must analyze the students who use this material [4]. First of all, it is necessary to understand the general situation, i.e. the current level, learning attitude, classroom performance and culture, and the distribution of the degree of the students in this class; at the same time, it is also necessary to grasp as much as possible the name of each student and the relevant background information, especially the individual factors of affective cognition, such as motivation, attitude, personality, learning strategies, communication strategies, cognitive styles, and so on.
Students in a Chinese as a foreign language classroom may come from all over the world, and different native speakers produce different biases in the learning process, so teachers need to know in advance the country-specific situation of the students in the class and make teaching adjustments based on the comparison with the native language. It is almost universally recognized that Chinese characters are difficult to learn, especially for students from non-Chinese speaking cultures. Chinese characters are a completely new writing system, and unlike Pinyin, they are the only ideographs still in use today. In Pinyin, the form and the sound of a character are two in one, and they are linked together with the meaning, combining the form and the meaning by means of the sound, while in Chinese, the form, the sound and the meaning are in a three-pronged situation. The Chinese language is a situation in which form, sound and meaning are in a three-legged race. Therefore, for students from non-Chinese culture circles, learning Chinese characters not only requires the combination of form and sound, but also the combination of form and meaning. As a result of breaking the existing way of thinking, beginners who are accustomed to pinyin characters often regard Chinese characters as “heavenly books”, and each character is an abstract picture to them. Therefore, when teaching Chinese characters, it is necessary to differentiate between students in the Chinese character circle and those in the non-Chinese character circle.
The national psychology of students from different countries varies greatly. Generally speaking, Asian students have high self-esteem and are reluctant to speak up if they are not absolutely sure. European and American students, on the other hand, are more outgoing and active, eager to answer questions in class, enthusiastic and sociable. Of course, this is not absolute. When preparing for class, we should determine the questioning methods and teaching techniques according to the different psychology of the students.
In addition, it is necessary to understand students’ motivation, which is one of the most important factors influencing students’ foreign language learning. Teachers can consolidate the motivation by combining external motivation with rewards and praises, for example, preparing some small prizes with Chinese characteristics, so that they can get a surprise after boring learning, which will help to further mobilize their interest in learning.
Teaching is no longer just a process of imparting knowledge and learning, but a process in which teachers and students co-construct the process of knowledge and life. Teaching is no longer a teacher-led monologue, but a special interaction between teachers and students based on communication, dialog, cooperation as the basis for special interaction activities of cultural inheritance and innovation. Interactive teaching can effectively improve the quality of teaching, make boring learning lively, and change passive learning into active learning. In the classroom, “teacher-centered” gives way to “student-centered” can maximize the stimulation of students’ interest in learning, and give full play to students’ subjective initiative, thereby improving learning efficiency. It is conducive to the improvement of students’ communicative ability and communicative quality. At the same time, the interactive teaching method can make the static, written language show vivid, vivid features, so that language teaching from the textbook to free, in real life, learning to use the language, to experience the communicative function of the language, and then master the language.
4. Conclusion
Teaching Chinese as a foreign language has certain special characteristics, which require teachers to choose teaching behaviors that meet the receptive ability of foreign students according to their learning characteristics and knowledge experience in the teaching process. The ultimate goal of effective teaching is to improve the quality and efficiency of teaching, and to promote students’ acquisition of knowledge and improvement of abilities [5]. This paper analyzes the learning characteristics of Chinese language learners and proposes effective teaching strategies so that the classroom teaching process can really become a process in which teachers guide students to carry out effective teaching activities.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.