On Chinese Characters' Teaching Materials In The Teaching Of Chinese As Foreign Language

Chinese characters' teaching is an essential part in the Teaching ofChinese as Foreign Language (TCFL henceforth). And it is also an important factor inenhancing and evaluating teaching quality in TCFL. As is known that Chinese characteris ideogrammatic, its peculiarities in reading, writing and recognizing make therelationships between Chinese phonology, lexicon and grammar intricate, which makesthe teaching of Chinese characters one of the trickiest works in TCFL teaching. It isvery hard for those students whose mother tongues are alphabetic languages to "see theChinese word and make out its pronunciation". Comparing with other courses, thedesign of TCFL course and compilation of teaching material are held back. And this canbe regarded as one reason for the problems of the foreign students who are learningChinese.In the past 50 years we have plenty of experiences in teaching foreigners Chinese.Many researches have been done not only on Chinese itself but also on its teaching. Butwe shall have a clear mind that there is still a sea of problems that need resolving.Comparing with the achievements in teaching phonology, lexicon and grammar,Chinese characters' teaching is rather weak and there is a long way for us to go. Overmany years, researches on Chinese characters' teaching have been done from Chineseontology, teaching theories and methodologies. Though achievements have been madein the most recent years on research of Chinese characters teaching in respect offoreigners acquisition of Chinese characters, less importance is placed on study ofteaching materials. Teachers and researchers are clear that the research on Chinesecharacters' teaching is very important to the whole development of the field.Researchers have made great efforts on the analysis of Chinese characters' teachingmaterials. An overall research is needed.In recent years, scholars have gone about making researches on TCFL teachingmaterials, however, initiative and simple and lacking thorough and profound discussion.Therefore, seven well accepted textbooks of Chinese character teaching published inChina have been chosen as materials to analyze their contents, ranging from Chinesecharacters, character knowledge and their teaching methods, to the designing of practice. Also a great abundance of unbiased and objective statistics is included in the research,whose analysis presents deficiencies in the prevailing teaching materials. On that basis,the author proposes his unique understanding on making out TCFL teaching target,designing teaching syllabus, and pursuing general truth in TCFL in order to compilehighly qualified TCFL teaching materials and promote the developmental trend ofTCFL.