Evaluation of Special Purpose Mandarin Teaching Materials for Non-native Learners

At Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), two types of teaching materials are used to teach Mandarin as a foreign language to the tourism management programme students – the first for general purposes and the second for special purposes. In the tourism management programme, students learn Mandarin as a foreign language for four consecutive semesters i.e., from the first semester to the fourth semester. The students use general teaching materials in the first and second semesters. They learned more customized topics in the third semester using special-purpose teaching materials. The teaching material used in the third semester is a textbook entitled Foundation of Mandarin for Tourism Level 1, which comes with a CD ROM. Although the materials have been used for some time, the author thinks it is necessary to evaluate their use so that the findings can be used as inputs in future vetting, thus making the textbook and CD ROM more practical and accessible. There are six chapters in the textbook. However, to limit the scope of the study, the author evaluates only the second and third chapters. The study sample was a class of non-native students from the tourism management programme at the Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Pulau Pinang (UiTMPP). The author has adopted a quantitative method to carry out this study. A set of four-scale questionnaires was used to collect data. Data analysis shows that the textbook helps the students to speak simple Mandarin. However, some details can be added to some sections of the textbook to make them more comprehensive and accessible to use. The limitation of this study is that only 30 respondents participated in it, and all of them were from UiTMPP, thus, the result may not represent the perspectives of other learners with identical backgrounds from other branch campuses. Hence, there is still much space for discussion on this topic.