Design of exercises is one of the important links of teaching materials writing but the researches on this aspect are always been ignored. This thesis sorts out the important questions in exercise study and raised up several views based on this foundation: 1) the purposes of exercises has the distinction between the primary and the secondary; 2) the core conceptions of exercises study (such as methods, exercise patterns and question types) should be clearly defined; 3) the principles of compiling exercises are different from the purpose of exercise. This thesis gives 5 principles of compiling exercises relevantly in Mandarin school in China .

Exercises are one of the important links of writing teaching materials. The common view is that language is not learned by teaching but taking exercises. However, as for the importance of exercises, researches on this aspect develop slowly. HU Mingyang (1999) pointed out, “our teaching materials have less exercises and the sign of grinding out. They will make up the number of every exercises so that they spent more efforts on texts, grammar and notes, but less efforts on exercises.” During writing this thesis, we collected materials everywhere, but finally we only found less than 10 pieces of thesis about “exercises”. The references of researching exercises of course need not to be titled with “exercises”, but their statistics are convincing. In recent years, people keep coming up with the idea that exercises are the weak link in compiling and studying teaching materials for the students who study Chinese in China, (LIU Songhao,1999a; LI Shaolin,2001,2003; ZHENG Rui, 2001; XIAO Fei, 2002; ZHAO Yanfeng, 2006) and their view is true. This thesis firstly sorts out the current situation of exercise study easily. And based on this the thesis comes up with the personal opinions on the purpose, methods and compiling principles of exercises for the students who study Chinese in China, hoping to attract attentions of scholastic field on exercises study.

The current situation of exercises study

Exercises study has two important aspects: one is to start with exercises patterns and study its features based on the information from the students who study Chinese in China, designing principles and application areas; the other is to start with class patterns and study what kind of exercises patterns is suitable for comprehensive, spoken, reading and listening class patterns. These two aspects complement each other. The former can be considered as the foundation of the latter in a certain degree. From the current situation, we can find that studies on the latter one are more than the former. Here we won’t give examples any more. The number of studies on single exercise patterns is less. As for the materials that we can find, generally there are: multi-choices (LU Jianji ,1984; GUO Shujun, 1989; LIU Songhao,1996, 1997), dictation (LIU Songhao, 1995; WANG Jing, 2001), true or false (DAI Xixin, 1999), exegetical word exercise (LIU Songhao, 1999a), paraghrasing (ZHANG Xiaohui, 1997), listening and reading (LI Haiyan, 1998) and group activity (JIANG Yiliang, 1998; WANG Ruifeng, 2007) etc. Articles on compiling teaching materials will often talk about exercises incidentally (such as LI Quan, YANG Rui, 1999; CHENG Xiangwen, 2001; YANG Jizhou, 2003). The articles we can find that introduce the design of teaching material exercise specially are only YANG Huiyuan’s (1997) and CAO Xiaoyan (2005). References that discuss estimation of teaching materials (such as ZHAO Jinming, 1998) will also talk about some questions of exercises. References discuss from the aspect of exercise compiling principles are LI Yang’s (1994), ZHENG Rui’s (2001), XIAO Fei (2002), ZHOU Jian’s and TANG Ling’s (2004) and so on. In addition to these, LIU Songhao, WANG Yan (2002) and WANG Xiaona (2003) studied the problem of context in designing exercise. LI Shaolin (2001, 2003) discussed the application of the conceptions of generalization and differentiation in exercise design for the students who study Chinese in China .

Because the researches on exercise patterns are relatively less, we can’t explain clearly on many problems. For example, ZHOU Jian and TANG Ling (2004) quoted an intercommunication training question in The Bridge.