“Series for 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, which has been selected as the “2022 Funding 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 sub-volume of the fourth series of 26 volumes.

Based on the perspective of international Chinese language education, this book organizes the knowledge and teaching of nouns from three aspects: grammatical theory, acquisition error and teaching methods. Firstly, knowledge of nouns is classified into three categories: linguistic knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge and contextual knowledge, and is briefly introduced. Then, the types of errors in the process of noun acquisition are organized, the reasons for the errors are analyzed, and finally, the teaching methods and strategies of nouns are proposed. It is hoped that this book can provide a reference for teaching nouns in international Chinese language education, help teachers engaged in international Chinese language education, especially local front-line teachers, as well as provide a reference for Chinese language learners.

Li Jingrong has a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Shanghai Normal University (SHNU), and is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the SHNU International College of Chinese Studies. His research mainly focuses on functional linguistics, Chinese grammar and international Chinese language education. Professor Li has presided over and completed 4 national and provincial projects, published 5 books and textbooks, and more than 50 papers in ZHONGGUOYUWEN, Chinese Teaching in the World and other specialized academic journals.

How can there be a “protagonist” without “supporting roles”?

In the process of teaching Chinese as a second language, the teaching of words can be described as “fire and ice” with function words being the “fire” and content words being the “ice”. Function words have always been the focus of Chinese grammar teaching, and content words (except measure words) have always played “supporting roles”. Content word is a manifestation of the commonality of the language, while function word reflects the type of differences between languages, with the former easy to learn and the latter difficult to learn. Nevertheless, the typological characteristics of Chinese content words should not be neglected.

As the category with the largest quantity of all Chinese words, acquisition of nouns is characterized by a variety of errors. All languages have nouns, and nouns in different languages have their commonalities and differences, which should not be ignored in second language teaching.

What are the “three worlds” of nouns?

Linguistic phenomenon has three parallel worlds: the linguistic world, the physical world, and the psychological world. As a reflection of these three worlds, this book categorizes the types of knowledge about nouns into: linguistic knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge, and contextual knowledge. In the linguistic world of nouns, we can learn the functions of syntactic constituents, lexical composition, and quantitative expression of nouns; in the physical world of nouns, we can learn the functions of spatial expression, event expression, and word collocation of nouns; and in the psychological world of nouns, we can learn the functions of denotative expression of nouns.

A good “supporting role” for a good “protagonist” makes the “play” even more exciting!

Nouns is oriented to 80 questions and innovatively uses encyclopedic knowledge to explain the linguistic phenomena related to nouns, adding more energy to the “drama” of international Chinese teaching grammar from three modules: theoretical knowledge, acquisition error, and teaching methods. The popularization of grammatical knowledge, the practicality of grammatical items, and the pertinence of the acquisition situation of second language learners are deeply penetrated in every word of the book. This book is not only an inheritance and succession of the vast grammar of teaching nouns, but also an attempt and exploration. It is hoped that 80 questions in Nouns will be of practical help to front-line Chinese teachers, which will make the “supporting roles” vivid too.

This book is recommended to front-line language education teachers, language teaching researchers and postgraduate students in international Chinese language education and other language education majors.