A Study Of The Compilation Of Chinese Characters And Words In Malaysia Chinese Teaching Material Gateway To Mandarin Chinese

Malaysia has since commemorated her independence for almost 59 years now. Though Chinese form about 25% of her population, who maintain a well-established Chinese education system, and with the Chinese language commonly used among Chinese for conversation and communication, these have not led to an atmosphere of learning Chinese among other ethnics in Malaysia. The overall progress of learning Chinese as a second language has been slow. However, in the recent years, Malaysia is brewing an upsurge of learning Chinese due to the various functional and integrative factors such as the fervour for Chinese driven by the rise of China, as well as the aspiration to get a better offer in career, and to facilitate better communication with clients in the workplace in future and with Mandarin Chinese speaking friends.Teaching Chinese as a second language in the public universities was first started in the twentieth century in the 1970s in University of Malaya and National University of Malaysia, which was small in scale and number of students. By now, twenty public universities in Malaysia provide Chinese courses. Therefore the demand for a high quality and localised teaching material is inevitable in both government and private sector for language teaching. Since mastering the words of the language is the skeleton of language learning and linguistic output, therefore the study on the compilation of the words in teaching material will definitely achieve a beneficial effect on the effectual learning of Chinese for Malaysia students.This article based the teaching material entitled Gateway to Mandarin Chinese vol. 1-3 used by MARA University of Technology for her Chinese course as the object of study for the main reason that it is the material used by the largest number of students in public universities. Also it is relatively mature as it has been revised and republished for many times. The considerations on compilation of the words in the materials for teaching Chinese as a second language in Malaysia were summarised after studying the propriety of the words compiled in the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese.In order to do the quantitative study, firstly, corpora were built for both objects of study and reference. Then the Sketch Engine was used to do the word segmentation, and a certain degree of manual intervention was required. HZ_Freq and Excel were applied to do the statistic and comparison. The statistics were mainly about the quantity and frequency and also the replication and distribution of both Chinese characters and words compiled in the object of study. The ability of those Chinese characters to form the words was also counted. The comparison on Chinese characters and words between objects of study and reference was done as well. Apart from the quantitative study, a qualitative study was discussed especially on the composing issues found other than the selection of characters and words.Regarding the quantity of the Chinese characters in the object of study, it covered 90% of the characters generally used in books and newspapers. From the aspect of character selection,90% of the characters in the whole set of the teaching materials fit the need of teaching Chinese as a second language. However, from the aspect of the level of character, only 65% of the characters meet the level of beginners. The replication rate of the characters is favourable to learning but the distribution of the characters could be better arranged. There are 81% of the Chinese characters which are replicated for 7 times and above in the full set of the teaching materials that have met the requirement of the most ideal distribution, which consist of appearance in all three levels, appearance in the second and third level, and appearance in the third level. At each level of teaching material, of the Chinese characters which are replicated for 7 times and above only 50% to 70% is considered as being of very ideal distribution, which refers to appearance in every lesson or alternate lesson after the first time introduction in the teaching material. It shows that the distribution of Chinese characters in each level is less steady. However, the Chinese characters compiled in the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese are excellent in words formation. By referring to the Table of Word-formation Ability,57% of the Chinese characters in the teaching material are able to form twenty words and above, and the number of words formed are more than thirty thousands, which is 89% out of the total. In general, the Chinese characters compiled in the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese are brilliant and suitable for learning especially in a restricted learning time and language environment.About the words in the object of study, it is hard to define whether the quantity of words is up to standard or not, due to the inconsistency of the thesaurus. However, compared to some other research, the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese as a material for beginners has reached the number of vocabulary of around one thousand. Due to the standard of the segmentation of the material that hovers between words and phrases, it was hard to compare it with The Graded Chinese Words. And so it was compared only with another two references. The result shows that the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese shares 55% of the words with the Chinese textbooks of national primary school standard one to five, and shares 67% of the words with the Chinese textbooks of national-type primary school standard one to five. Excluding the factor of different target groups of the teaching material between adults and children, the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese still needs to put in effort to filter and choose the most appropriate words or vocabularies. The replication and distribution of the words is inadequate too due to the main cause of the low rate of replication. The vocabularies in the teaching material are those replicated three times and above, and in the full set of teaching materials only 65% have met the requirement of the most ideal distribution, while only 44% to 55% are considered very ideal distribution in each level of the teaching material.The studies on the composing issues were mainly divided into two main areas, which are the analysis of the Chinese Characters Exercise Book, and the composing of words in the textbook other than words selection. The Chinese Characters Exercise Book had shown its superiority in characters selection such as frequency, replication, word-formation ability, number of strokes and structure of the characters as well. Apart from the selection of words, the issue of compilation need to be taken note of, in particular the coherence among three levels of the exercise books, as well as the richness of the knowledge and significance of Chinese characters.There are some words composing issues in the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese that need to be taken note of. The part-of-speech tagging ought to be reviewed and re-examined, and the review on proof-reading is highly recommended. The annotation of words especially some modal particles may be explained more in the column of "Explanatory Note". Though the word segmentation in the Gateway to Mandarin Chinese shows its inconsistency, it has jumped out of the box and acted beyond the limitation of the regular Chinese teaching materials, whereby it considers more on the connotations of words, and the conveniences of bilingual annotation. The material obviously uses more local words than non-local words. It is useful and practical to students who learn the language with the purpose of communicating with local Chinese. It helps in increasing the opportunity of listening and speaking, instead of learning non-local words. The motive of learning and the language environment should be the concern in teaching material compilation.Some thoughts on the compilation of Chinese characters and words in teaching materials through studies:1. The ideas and order of teaching material compilation:Set the topic first, then select the words and write out the lesson contents as is applicable to the topic, but word selection need to be done according to the wordlist set at the beginning, not just with the common sense and imagination on the relevant topic. Let the wordlist be a gatekeeper to ensure that even if the learners learn a small quantity, they are capable of understanding others and to express themselves to a great measure in a second language environment.2. The selection of character list and wordlist:The list should be up to date and representative. The compilation and principle of The Graded Chinese Syllables, Characters and Words for the Application of Teaching Chinese to the Speakers of Other Languages fits the needs and requirements of worldwide Chinese teaching. It is an useful reference in course layout, teaching material compilation, class teaching, and evaluation. Of course, setting up a Malaysian Chinese corpus is certainly a better resolution to characters and words selection, which provides a trendy, representative and localised list of characters and words.3. The replication and distribution of Chinese characters and words:The ratio of core words, high, medium and low frequency words should be ladder-shaped distributed, and not stepped growth as other material in general used to do. Theoretically, the replication of words ought to be widening gradually, best possible in a spiral repetition style. For materials that have fewer lessons, the words should be controlled to appear at least in alternate lesson or the most in the intervals of only two lessons, depending on the number and time of lessons.4. The give and take between local words and Putonghua:The compilation of local words is appropriate and also a must, when the target group is local students with the motive of learning to communicate with local Chinese. It is encouraged to give some explanation or do some comparison on the way of expression between Malaysian Chinese and Chinese Putonghua. That shall enrich and add fun to the language learning.5. The knowledge of Chinese characters and the order of learning:As a supporting material, Chinese character exercise book is not necessaryly compiled according to the sequence of the contents of the textbook. In fact, it can be compiled according to the patterns of Chinese character system, such as "strokes-components-single-component characters-multiple-component characters". Besides that, considering the number of strokes and the difficulty of structures may underscore the scientific aspect of the teaching of Chinese character as well. The knowledge of Chinese character such as the character-formation may increase the knowledge and interest of learning too.6. The approach of other composing issues:By using the method of "word as primary, phrase as secondary" in compilation may cause repetitions in annotation and uncertainty in POS tagging, but phrase teaching makes the bilingual annotation easier and provides the connotations between words as well. POS tagging plays an important role in language learning especially when it comes to the use of the word. Function words such as modal particles should be explained well to prevent errors. Finally, proof-reading ought to be done seriously, for the entry of any language in language teaching is the medium of teaching, as well as the objectives of teaching.