With the development of globalization, the influence of Chinese as a world language is growing. Teaching Mandarin as a foreign language has become the main way for non-native speakers to master Chinese. This paper explores the application of multimedia-assisted teaching in teaching Mandarin as a foreign language, especially the impact on classroom teacher-student interaction behavior. The study was conducted through an experimental design in which three classroom hours of teaching Mandarin as a foreign language were implemented in High School B in Wuxi City. Data were collected through classroom video recordings and teacher-student interviews to analyze the frequency of interaction and behavioral transitions during the teaching process. The results showed that after using multimedia-assisted teaching, the frequency of teacher-student interactions in the classroom was significantly increased, with a technology manipulation rate of 55.75% for students and 37.46% for teachers. In addition, students’ thinking and practicing activities in the classroom occupied 65.61% of the time, indicating that students were able to participate more autonomously and actively in the learning process. The results of the lagged sequence analysis further revealed that the behavioral transitions between teachers and students were significant, especially in the questioning and feedback sessions. The conclusion points out that multimedia-assisted teaching can effectively improve the quality of interaction and students’ learning engagement in teaching Mandarin as a foreign language.
