Research On Chinese Character Teaching In American Chinese Schools

The teaching of Chinese characters has its unique characteristics that differ from the teaching to native Chinese children and foreigners.However,the uniqueness has been overlooked for many years.Most of the researches on the teaching of Chinese characters were targeted at adult international students,very rare were at the students of Chinese-heritage schools.With the rapid development of Chinese education in American public school system,it in turn stimulates the development of Chinese-heritage schools,and consequently the Chinese-heritage schools urgently call for the explorations of better ways to teach the Chinese characters to their students.Based on this author's many years of teaching experience in the American Chinese-heritage schools and the theories of the teaching Chinese characters to foreigners,the author explored the Chinese character teaching which is targeted at the students in Chinese heritage schools.This thesis mainly discussed four aspects of it.The thesis first examined the characteristics of Chinese character teaching in Chinese-heritage schools in America,including the targeted students,the course set up and the language environment.Students are the center of the teaching activity.Even with the same Chinese heritage,students from different family background exhibit different learning styles.They also have different motivations and strategies towards Chinese character learning than that of the adult international students.Second,the thesis discussed several principles of the Chinese character teaching that are particularly in line with the Chinese school students.In respect to the distinctive features of the character usage,students of different family language background tend to have different cognitions towards the Chinese characters;as a result,different teaching approaches should be adopted.To students from Chinese speaking families,character-centered approach is of help;while to students from non-Chinese speaking families,words oriented approach is a better way to learn the usage of characters instead.Based on the psychological studies that Chinese character recognition and writing are two correlated while different cognitive processes,and in consideration of students age and the annul teaching hours,different requirements—be able to recognize or write,towards certain characters should be established,with the stress on the ability of recognizing.Pinyin,which is a helpful tool to native Chinese children and adult international students to learn characters,is somewhat a hindrance to Chinese-heritage school students living in the English language environment,thus,direct connection between the pronunciations and their form of characters should be established in the first place and the introduction of Pinyin be delayed.The third aspect discussed some effective teaching methods and activities that can be utilized in the classroom.The complexity of Chinese characters is related to the errors that the students of Chinese-heritage schools make.Based on the error analysis,the thesis proposed to pay more attention on the teaching of strokes and the order of strokes,on the analyzing of the character elements,especially the ideographic and phonographic elements,and on the teaching characters in context.Since children tend to learn better through games,by integrating some popular American TV and board games into Chinese character teaching,children's motivation in learning characters will be aroused and strategies be formed.In addition,out-of-school activities and homework assignments are the extension of classroom instructions.They appear to be more critical especially to students in the English speaking environment.Besides those traditional homework assignments,in the fourth part,this thesis discussed some fun activities that students would like to be involved at home,which not only give students some chances to practice what was learned in school,but also engage them in learning on their own.