Nowadays, the multimedia technology has been widely used in the second language teaching. Comparing with the traditional teaching methods, the multimedia measure has many irreplaceable advantages. It can cover some shortages of the traditional teaching, bringing great change to Chinese language teaching. Teachers in Chinese language school can make full use of the multimedia technology to enrich the teaching contents, models and methods and so on.
When foreigners come to learn Chinese in China, they may have found that there are many problems exist in the traditional teaching methods. First of all, the teaching books are the only reference of teaching. When teaching foreigners, teachers should teach more cultural knowledge on the basis of language teaching. Besides, the classroom teaching focuses on teaching. As a result, students have less time to practice what they have learned.
What‘s more, the traditional Chinese teaching lack of the real language communication environment. The final goal of teaching Chinese language as a foreign language is to train the learners’ language ability and communicative ability. However, in traditional teaching, teachers fail to provide real language context for students to learn to speak Chinese. It will fail to stimulate their initiative and will not reach the teaching goal.
However, the multimedia courseware has many advantages in classroom teaching. First of all, the teaching activities become lively, directly and interesting so that to improve the teaching result. The multimedia courseware can show students the order of strokes so that they can remember firmly. Besides, interest is the best teacher for students to study Chinese. The multimedia technology can combine sound, words, pictures and cartons together to stimulate their interest.
When teachers use multimedia courseware to teach Mandarin Chinese, students can pay attention to the screen but not look at their own books. Therefore, teachers can control the whole classroom situations. It will be beneficial to do language practice and interactivity between teachers and students. The teaching points can be marked with striking colors to draw students‘ attention.
When lecturing grammar and words, it is difficult to describe the situations with pure language. With the application of multimedia technology, it will be easier to create language contexts because it is a combination of characters, pictures, sound and videos and so on. Teachers can apply all kinds of multimedia methods to help students are involved in learning Mandarin Chinese.
In classroom teaching, the teachers teach some language points to the students. The extra background knowledge is essential to help students consolidate what they have learned. When foreigners come to study in China, they are not familiar with some information about China. By using the multimedia courseware, teachers can show rich contents of background knowledge with various forms.
If we apply the hypermedia technology to the multimedia courseware, we can bring new vigor to the classroom teaching that is featured by the lecturing and demonstrating. If there are hyperlinks in new words and grammar points when teachers lecture the text, students can check the notes when they learn Mandarin. It seems the associative memory way so it will strengthen the learning efficiency because it fit learners‘ habits.
In addition, the multimedia technology can help train students‘ various thinking ways, thus improving learning efficiency. The multimedia teaching can process the teaching contents comprehensively to transmit the teaching information. Therefore, the stimulation it provides is not simplex but comprehensive. All of the stimulation will help not only gain their learning interest and improve the learning initiative to learn Chinese language, but also put them into a learning process that combines the abstract with the concrete.
At present, the most frequently used tool for making multimedia courseware is the PowerPoint. It is convenient to make use of this tool to help students to study Mandarin Chinese because it can be made easily and processed conveniently. Besides, it provides various techniques of expression. It can be saved and modified so that you can use it whenever you need it.
With the development of Chinese language teaching, the multimedia teaching has become a kind of tendency. Therefore, teachers should make full use of PowerPoint to apply the multimedia courseware to Chinese language classroom teaching.