Abstract
Despite the fact that textbooks are central in Chinese language learning, only limited research has explored to what extent textbooks’ content is relevant from a vocabulary perspective. In recent years much work on the potential of quantitative database of Chinese elementary textbooks has been carried out in modern Chinese linguistics; however there is still considerable disagreement with regard to practical objective data on vocabulary used in Chinese language textbooks at different levels. This paper focuses specifically on the quantitative analysis and aims to introduce the quantitative characteristics of vocabulary in four Chinese elementary textbooks: “Practical Chinese Reader” “新实用汉语课本”, “Developing Chinese. Comprehensive course. Beginner level” “发展汉语初级综合”, “Boya Chinese. Elementary” “博雅汉语初级”, “Chinese course” “汉语教程”. In order to identify quantitative database the corpus has been constructed based on the words in the textbooks. The main stages of building text corpus of Chinese elementary textbooks are outlined. Statistical significance was analyzed through the use of linguistic Internet program “Chinese Corpus online”. The research results are presented. Based on the database, statistical analyses, such as the index of vocabulary diversity, the index of exclusivity, the average repetition of the word in the text, etc., are conducted. This work has proved that there is great variation in the number and selection of words across the books indicating that there does not seem to be a common thought behind word selection in textbooks used to teach Chinese as a foreign language. The present findings have important implications for future textbook development and may be used for writing Chinese textbook for Ukrainian students. Future studies on the current topic are therefore required in order to establish a frequency dictionary and a quantitative proficiency guideline for material development.
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