Thoughts on the Use of “le” in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages: Problems and Suggestions

Abstract

Within the context of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (hereafter TCSOL), the teaching of “le” is a key and thought-provoking grammatical point. Holding the view that the general explanations, often used in textbooks, are not easy for students to comprehend, after studying the relevant literature and drawing examples from specific textbooks, we make some suggestions regarding the teaching of “le”. The innovation of this article is the proposal of a unified approach to the interpretation of “le” within the theory of “realization”, the avoidance of the concepts of “complete” and “change”, of “le1 + le2 = le3” and of the idea that “le2” indicates the “tone”. Simultaneously, we propose the increase of the subjective communicative uses of “le”, the distinction between the meanings of sentence patterns and word meanings, and the unification of related terms.