The Enlightenment of Zankov’s “High Difficulty” Principle on Classical Chinese Teaching in Primary Schools

Zankov’s “high difficulty” principle requires teachers to stimulate students’ desire to learn by setting reasonable difficulty barriers for students, so as to develop students’ spiritual strength to the greatest extent. The principle of “high difficulty” contains the philosophical significance from quantitative change to qualitative change as well as general and special development. From the “high difficulty” principle, the problems in the teaching of classical Chinese in primary schools mainly include: arbitrarily increasing the difficulty of teaching materials and exercises, with failing to achieve the teaching objectives of classical Chinese; the single form of class fails to arouse students’ interest in learning; and blindly pursuing the equalization of learning progress and failing to take care of differentiated students. This paper is to explore the strategies of solving the problem existing in current primary school Chinese teaching: reasonably control the difficulty and depth of teaching, while pay attention to the cultivation of good learning motivation; adopt appropriate and efficient teaching methods to promote the systematization of classical Chinese knowledge; correctly understand the individual differences of students and adopt hierarchical teaching.