Research on Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in Colleges and Universities Based on Multimodal Theory: An Example from a Comprehensive Elementary Chinese Course

Today, with China's increasing international influence, the number of international students coming to China is increasing, and the cause of Chinese language education for foreigners is booming. Taking the multimodal theory as the guiding principle, the article establishes an immersion teaching mode for Chinese as a foreign language by analyzing the characteristics of a comprehensive elementary Chinese language course. Sixteen students from the College of International Education of University T were selected as the research subjects, and the design of teaching methods and teaching processes based on the immersion teaching model, as well as the design of a comparative experiment on the teaching of the comprehensive elementary Chinese language class were carried out. The composite mean score of the Chinese post-test scores of the class based on the immersion teaching mode was 87.89, with an overall mean score increase of 22.39 points, and the students' grammar test scores increased by a total of 4.02 times from the 1st week to the 16th week. The mean value of students' satisfaction with the instructional design was 4.432 points, and 89.39% of international students expressed their approval of the immersion teaching mode. Taking the multimodal theory as a guide and combining the immersion teaching mode to realize the efficient interaction between teachers and students provides a new path to improve the dChinese language mastery and cross-cultural awareness of international students in China. © 2024 Xiaolan Wang, published by Sciendo.