The Errors And Strategies For Children Learning Chinese Under The Multi-lingual Language Environment

The research of Teaching Chinese as a Foisign Language started in the 1950s. Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language has its academic and application values. Its importance shows not only the exchange of cultural and academic research, but in terms of communication. The language development of children is a combination of the effect of biological, social and environmental factors. All of the following will affect the learning outcome: the age at which children start learning Chinese; the influence of the mother tongue; the dynamics of the internal and external environment.The research target of this thesis is a group of students, age 7 to 10, who study in an international school. By studying the best time for children to learn a language, this thesis aims at drawing a conclusion base on error analysis so that effective teaching strategies can be designed to improve teaching performance.Apart from age, mother tongue of the children is also one of the influencing factors. The main language for communication for this research group is English and/or Cantonese. Children coming from different countries will speak their own native language in this group. According to the conduct error analysis of learning Chinese in this research group, we discover that the fundamental influencing factor is the mother tongue. This group of students grows up in Hong Kong in a multi-language environment, to learn Chinese language under this condition, the students are suffering from both the mother tongue influence and environmental language influence at the same time.In the research, we conducted a survey by sending questionnaires to the parents of this research group on their living environment; the expectation and guidance from the parents; the use of language. All these will have adverse effect on the motive and attitude on the children in learning. Detailed analysis of this information unveil that the children will achieve a higher scores with parents who are willing to provide the Chinese learning environment and with expectation for good result.Many scholars considered that the children do have the similar strategy and characteristics in learning their native and/or foreign language. The research conducted in this thesis proved that the cognitive behaviour of children in learning their native language and foreign language are basically indistinguishable.