Weiss, Goebel's "mother Tongue And Mother Tongue Education" Theory And Its Research And Teaching Of Chinese Characters

Mother tongue is tightly connected with everyone, every nation and even the whole mankind and is extraordinarily important. But around us, the Chinese language and characters are widely abused; the research work about Mandarin Chinese suffers from an inherent shortage, because from the very start we have been used to copying grammars for foreign languages; the teaching of the mother tongue is somehow pointless and is losing its significance. There is still much to be discussed and improved on the topic of mother tongue.This dissertation starts from Leo Weisgerber, the famous German linguist in the 20th. century and his linguistic research. Weight is laid on (1) his ideas about mother tongue and language society, which enlightened us a lot in the research into and use of Chinese language and characters, and (2) his ideas about mother tongue education, with which we link the actual situations in our mandarin language art, and on the base of a questionnaire survey about the situations in elementary schools, we will point out what we can benefit from Weisgerber's ideas, the problems in our mother tongue education and how to solve them.Six chapters consist of this dissertation:the first chapter is the introduction about Weisgerber (including his life and his academic activities), the literature reviews about Weisgerber's linguistic theories and the practical significance of this thesis; the second chapter deals with Weisgerber's profound researches about mother tongue, including etymological researches, his opinions about mother tongue and the law of language society; the third chapter discusses what these thoughts can enlighten us in our Chinese context, especially on the researches of Chinese grammar and characters; the fourth chapter takes linguistic field theory as an example and shows us how Weisgerber did his mother tongue research, and furthermore it discusses how this theory has developed in our country; the fifth chapter deals with Weisgerber's ideas about mother tongue education, including his opinions about education, the origins of his these ideas and his practices; the last chapter is based on a questionnaire survey about the actual situations in our mandarin language art in elementary schools, both problems in the course of mother tongue education and solutions will be pointed out, then it will introduce the teaching ideas and teaching methods of two Chinese teachers who are making positive contributions to the education reform. The two appendices are a list of writings created by Weisgerber and the questionnaire used in our research.