“Series of Teaching Foreigners Chinese Grammar” is the achievement of “Research and Development of Grammar Syllabus for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and Teaching Reference Grammar Series (Multi-volume)”, a major project of National Social Science Fund of China sponsored by Professor Qi Huyang, and has been selected as the “2022 Founding Project of National Publication Foundation”. As an important reference book for international Chinese language education, it aims to build and improve the “Grammar System of Chinese Teaching” for foreign students to meet the development needs of the new era. It mainly serves the front-line Chinese teachers, researchers, graduate students and undergraduates majoring in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages. This series consists of 39 volumes, including 4 outline series, 26 book series, 8 summary series, and 1 collection of essays.

This book is a fascicule of the first edition in the series of 26 volumes.

Designed for front-line teachers engaged in teaching Chinese as a second language and based on the principles of universality and practicability, this book comprehends 60 common problems of modal adverbs in second language teaching from three aspects including theory, knowledge acquisition and teaching. In the theoretical part, the common problems of modal adverbs as a “class” are answered from a macro perspective. In the knowledge acquisition part, the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic problems of individual modal adverbs and the identification of common confusable words are analyzed based on the international students’ acquisition bias and common problems. In the teaching part, the practical problems of modal adverbs in teaching and learning are discussed in the light of the combination of theory and practice.

Li Tiefan, PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Shanghai Normal University, is a professor and the president of Huangshan University, who is a famous teacher in Anhui Province. He is in charge of the national first-class undergraduate major construction site of “International Chinese Language Education” and the national first-class undergraduate program of “Modern Chinese”. His main research focuses on modern Chinese grammar and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. He has published more than 50 papers in journals such as China Social Science Digest, and Curriculum, Teaching Material and Method and 1 monograph, and has presided over more than 10 projects such as the sub-projects of major projects of the National Social Science Foundation and the major projects of key research bases of the Ministry of Education for humanities and social sciences. He was awarded the first prize of social science by the People’s Government of Anhui Province and the first prize of teaching achievements in Anhui Province.

Chen Xiaolei is a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), and an associate professor at Beijing Chinese Language and Culture College. Her research focuses on modern Chinese grammar and second language teaching. She has published more than 10 papers in journals such as Contemporary Rhetoric, Chinese Language Learning, and TCSOL Studies, and 1 monograph and co-edited several textbooks.

Provided that modal adverbs are abstract and difficult to teach, this book is designed for front-line teachers of Chinese as a second language, aiming at popularizing the basic knowledge, teaching theory and methods of modal adverbs. The book adopts the question-and-answer teaching format, introduces theoretical knowledge comprehensively, breaks down “difficult problems” from multiple angles, and analyses the problems with real examples. Most of the proposed questions meets the practical needs of teaching, analyzing the semantic features and pragmatic conditions from the perspective of real bias and common problems of international students, and focusing on the identification of confusable words. In the final teaching part, theory and practice are combined to comprehensively discuss the teaching problems of modal adverbs, and several typical modal adverbs are taken as examples for the demonstration of specific teaching design, which helps teachers to open up their minds for more teaching design.

This book is for international Chinese language teachers and undergraduate and postgraduate students of international Chinese language education.