A Study of Vocabulary Teaching in Junior Comprehensive TCSL Courses

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of teaching Chinese as a second language(TCSL). Based on a collection and analysis of words that foreign students at the junior level usually get wrong,(1) this paper suggests that TCSL teachers should make sure that new words in textbooks are explained accurately and foresee the words that students may misunderstand during vocabulary teaching. In addition to conceptual meanings, they should analyze and explain affiliated meanings, grammatical functions, and common collocations with other words through typical sentence examples. They should also pay attention to the potential role played by the semantic transparency of words in understanding, acquiring, and selecting the meanings of such words. The teaching of separable words should focus on their pragmatic forms. Simple conversations can be made to strengthen students’ memorization, while quantifiers can be taught via their etymology to help students develop a reasonable understanding of the collocation rules between quantifiers and corresponding nouns.