In teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Chinese writing class is one of the teaching links. Both elementary and advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language must develop their own writing skills.
Chinese writing course is an important course in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. However, whether in the elementary writing class or the advanced writing class, students have some problems in writing short sentences and articles. So as a TCSL teacher, how to cultivate students’ writing level?
Accumulation of corpora
Read and recite excellent corpus. In writing teaching, students often lack of confidence in writing and don’t have skillful language use, because their reserves on vocabulary are not enough, and they only focus on the use of vocabulary and sentence patterns instead of on the content and structure arrangement, which leads to the blocked discourse coherence or gives others a kind of feeling of unsmooth, incoherent and lack of unified central idea. In order to overcome the common problems in this kind of exercises, the teacher might as well ask the students to recite some excellent student compositions and famous writers’ articles. Through reciting this compulsory input, students can strengthen the accumulation and consolidation of students’ language knowledge and promote the students’ internalization of language knowledge to form a sense of language. The sensitivity of students to Chinese language phenomenon will be gradually enhanced with the continuous increase of recitation input, the implicit language knowledge will be constantly expanded, the sense of language will be constantly strengthened and the written content will be more and more in line with the Chinese thinking and expression habits.
Outline Teaching
An outline can be used as a general guide to the whole text, so that the text or paragraph can be closely linked to the center, not deviate from the center. In Chinese writing, students often digress from the topic because of the lack of overall consciousness, and they do not consider the relationship between the content of each part and the central idea. They write with a certain degree of randomness, so their writing will inevitably stray from the topic. If there is a clear outline before the formal start of writing, there will always be a clear line of thought in the text, which can make the development of the discourse closely linked to a central idea. Therefore, the writing outline is an important preparatory work before writing, which can help the author to fully explore the writing object and lay the foundation for successful writing.
Teachers can use flexible methods to encourage students to write outlines according to the actual situation. For example, teachers can use heuristic methods to let students focus on the topic.
