Methods Of Acquisition Of Chinese Characters By Thai Students

In recent years, researches on Chinese language as a second acquisition language have been increasing commonality of interests, but the researches on character acquisition, especially the second Chinese character acquisition, do not seem to follow suit. And no research on Chinese characters acquisition by Thai students has been undertaken so far. This thesis bases on the theories of second language acquisition and incorporates some of the metacognition theories. The methods used are mainly survey, comparison, and combination of the theory with practicality. Participants in our research are Thai students and we tried to look for best methods in Chinese characters acquisition.In the first step of this thesis, we made a survey of the condition of using Chinese characters in Thai society, condition of using Chinese characters by Thai students, and condition of teaching Chinese characters in the universities of Thailand, and then analyzed the data from survey in the second step. In collecting the data of this research, we made up also a test to compare between the acquisition of traditional and simplified Chinese characters, in order to find out which one would be easier for primary acquisition. It is also obvious that Chinese language itself alongside with Chinese characters is undergoing a process of development by simplification. In addition, according to Thai society condition, we think that using the former kinds of characters in primary acquisition would be more appropriate to Thai students than the latter one.Besides, from the metacognition theory point of view, we demonstrated the way of acquiring Chinese characters by Thai students. For the Chinese characters structure problem, we suggest to use the way that Thai students use the composition of Thai characters that is similar to Chinese characters in Chinese characters structure acquisition. For the number of Chinese characters needed in primary acquisition, we suggest to set a limit to Chinese characters with high frequency, from which it could be selected the ones with an easy structure and that can allow many word-building, and the word-building should be in a similar way in Chinese language as well as in Thai language.In the end, we discuss how to design a multimedia-assisted software for teachingChinese characters to Thai students. The design sets on how to recognize, to write, and to ase Chinese characters. In designing the multimedia assisted software, we suggest to use mainly traditional Chinese characters; the characters and words to be selected should be all of high frequency of using and the word building and meaning should be similar to the mother tongue. It wilt help students' speediness in recognizing the new words or characters. Through the software, students could increase their Chinese cfcafaeters abilities. Finally, there are some problems that have not been covered in this research, that could constitute a subject for furer studies, for example research awed to mafce up a multimedia assisted software and a table of Chinese characters of high frequency for teaching Thai students. The entire thesis contains approximately fifty letters.