Flashcards for Taiwan Benchmarks for the Chinese Language (TBCL) vocabulary

Introduction​

The attached file contains flashcards for all the vocabulary (>14,425 entries in total) found on the official website for the TBCL data sets hosted by the National Academy for Educational Research in Taiwan categorized by their respective levels. There are more entries in the text file than can be found in the source data, because some entries in the original contain multiple forms of the same word combined in a single entry, e. g. entry #9 車子/車. These have been split into two separate entries, one for 車子 and one for just 車.

The file only includes the simplified and traditional headword per entry. No definition or pinyin is provided, since the source data also does not offer that information. The idea behind the creation of this flashcard deck is to have a way to prepare for the TOCFL or to have an easy way to judge how "hard", "frequent" or "important" a word might be based on its level when, for example, using Pleco to read material in Chinese. For the latter use case you can make use of the category tag feature to see the level of the word in the definition screen as shown in the screenshots below.

Category format: // TBCL/第1級

tbcl-pleco-category-tags.jpg
tbcl-pleco-category-tag.jpg

What is TBCL?​

Taiwan Benchmarks for the Chinese Language (TBCL), a research result of the Eight-year Chinese as a Second Language Development Project of the Ministry of Education, is a comprehensive set of the Chinese language competence descriptors produced with special account taken of the characteristics of the Chinese language. From August 2021, its scale will be displayed on the TOCFL transcripts along with those of other major language frameworks like CEFR and ACTFL to better indicate the correspondence between them.

The design of the 2021 TOCFL is based on an integrated system of the use of linguistic corpuses and the TBCL descriptors of the lexis, phrases, and syntax system. A new version of TOCFL (TOCFL 2.0) will be officially launched in 2023.

- Official Steering Committee for the Test Of Proficiency Announcement
The TBCL sets out seven levels of Chinese language proficiency in the five skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. It also includes lists which contains 3,100 Chinese characters, 14,425 words, and 496 grammar points for leaners of level 1 to 5.

The TBCL has been designed to fully align with ACTFL and CEFR levels. The correspondence between TBCL and CEFR shows that in listening, reading, and writing skills, the level 1 and 2 of TBCL are lower than CEFR A1; in speaking, the level 1 of TBCL is lower than CEFR A1. The results reveal that the TBCL complies with the Chinese language characteristics and meets learning needs of non-native speakers.

- 國家教育研究院
 

Attachments

  • tbcl-pleco.txt
    220.3 KB · Views: 275
Top