Evaluating the intended learning outcome of ancient Chinese teaching materials with teaching-oriented corpus

摘要

Ancient Chinese is a core course of the department of Chinese language and literature. However, its intended learning outcomes with the existing textbooks are hard to evaluate, as the article selection, language point analysis, and overall arrangement are mostly based on editors' subjective experience. In order to quantify the expected learning outcomes, we put forward a novel approach, based on the vocabulary knowledge corpus for ancient Chinese teaching. Then a case study is carried out by comparing three representative textbooks, in regard to text length, language point density, distribution of new language points, as well as the learning curve. In the end, the re-ordering of the articles in the textbooks is discussed and new learning curves which better fits the principle of gradual improvement are obtained. To sum up, our approach to evaluate the learning outcomes of Ancient Chinese textbooks not only provides a quantitative method for textbook assessment, but constitutes an exploratory attempt in introducing outcome-based education into Ancient Chinese teaching.