In today's highly developed information technology era, language teaching is increasingly seeking out ICT-assisted teaching. However, language teachers may not have fully exploited the efficiency of information technology, as they still need to spend a considerable amount of time searching and selecting language materials. While many corpora offer a vast amount of authentic materials that teachers need, due to various factors, these corpora have not received adequate attention and are not fully utilised. In a bid to tackle this problem, Singapore Centre for Chinese Language (SCCL) is developing an online teaching resources platform for Chinese Language teachers and curriculum developers. The platform, integrating the "Singapore Daily Written Chinese Corpus" and "Singapore Chinese Textbook Corpus" built by the SCCL, comprises of a text grading and classifying function, a teachers forum, and several modules that can be used to retrieve information on Chinese characters, lexicons, and sentence patterns. Among these functions, the text grading function has an accuracy of 82%. This paper explains in detail the design and general purpose of each module in the platform and at the same time, sums up the feedbacks from the teachers and researchers who had tried the beta version of the platform. In general, the data and functions of the platform are highly regarded and will serve to be a valuable resource for Chinese Language teaching, curriculum development and school-based curriculum design.

Keywords: corpus, Chinese language teaching, authentic material, resource platform

This paper discusses the following three issues for consideration when developing basic Chinese character lists. (1) Aim: The aim of a basic Chinese character list is for use in the teaching of Chinese language instead of Chinese characters; (2) Number: The appropriate number of basic Chinese characters in the list should be around 1500; (3) Learning degree: This paper proposes to use the concept of "learning degree" instead of "character frequency" as the guiding principle for the development of a basic character list. The authors argue that a basic Chinese character list constructed under the principle of "learning degree" at both macro and micro levels is more useful for second language learners.

Keywords: basic Chinese character list, number of characters included, character frequency, learning degree

The study aims at differentiating the near-synonymous pair Yinqi and Chansheng. Corpus-based analysis approach as well as the relevant Chinese dictionaries are used to analyze the data which are collected from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese and Chinese Word Sketch. Four aspects are discussed, including the syntactic patterns, the semantic characteristics, the semantic roles, and collocations. The result shows that both Yinqi and Chansheng can function as predicate verb, with and without objects followed, as well as attributive. Both are widely used when they are followed by objects or used as attributive, but only Chansheng can be nominalized. Teaching suggestions are raised with the conjugation of Chinese pedagogical grammar principals (Teng, 2009) to achieve the goal of the study.

Keywords: synonym, Yinqi, Chansheng, Chinese teaching, teaching application

This paper attempts to discuss the important role of contemporary Chinese popular literature in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL), which is mainly about enhancing learners' language and intercultural competence while lowering their affective filter. The Constructivist Theory and Reader-response Criticism provide the theoretical foundation for the practice of contemporary Chinese popular literature in a TCSL class. A case study was conducted in a university of Australia to verify its practicability and feasibility. Students' feedback and their enthusiasm in class proved that it was effective in an intermediate advanced TCSL class.

Keywords: teaching Chinese as a second language, contemporary Chinese popular literature, constructivism, reader-response

Generally speaking, multiple choice is the main question type to examine elementary students' comprehension of Mandarin wording, while maze games requires no complicated rules and regulations to play and are well accepted by schoolchildren. What the former and the latter have in common is that learners are required to think thoroughly before making their choices. This study, aimed at developing teaching materials of "joyful learning of Mandarin wording with maze illustrations", is based on the experience of the elementary students and their teachers. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods, it intends to discuss the design principles of the teaching materials and to evaluate how well the elementary students are motivated based on ARCS (Keller, 1983) learning motivations to learn Mandarin wording. The study will further investigate the learning effects of mandarin wording with maze illustrations. It is expected to serve as a reference for the reading and learning of mandarin.

Keywords: maze illustrations, Mandarin wording, joyful learning, design-based research, ARCS learning motivations

Teaching of reading usually involves the teaching of different text genres. The narrative text is a main genre while the narrative structure is a basic element in the structure of different genres. Therefore, it is imperative for reading lessons to include the teaching of narrative text analysis. Based on genre pedagogy, the author has identified three main elements of the narrative text - Setting, Character and Event. Setting includes time, place, and atmosphere of the whole text. Character comprises the main characters' current/past conditions, appearances, thoughts, discourse, actions, and also their relationships and interactions with other characters. Event consists of orientations, complications, conflicts, transitions, resolutions, influence/evaluations of main events occurred in the text. Through a sample teaching design and lesson plan using Singapore Chinese teaching materials, this paper demonstrates how to apply tabular analyses of narrative texts structure to enhance the effectiveness of the teaching of reading narrative texts.

Keywords: narrative, teaching of reading, text analysis, genre pedagogy, setting, character, event