A Comparative Study On Students' Motivations Of Adopting Chinese Calligraphy Who Are From The Sonogram Cultural Circle And The Non-Sinogram Cultural Circle

As students from the Sonogram Cultural Circle (SCC) and the Non-Sinogram Cultural Circle (NSCC) are very distinctive in cultural background, are there differences in their motivations of adopting Chinese Calligraphy (CC)? Generally speaking, CC is viewed as a complementary subject aiming to enrich the international students' knowledge of Chinese culture. Few relative researches on this subject can be found. Therefore, in this paper firstly the Motivation Theory and the studies in the field of Teaching Chinese as a second language (TCSL) which apply the Motivation Theory as the theoretical frame are reviewed and summed up. Based on that and by referring to those studies, a questionnaire survey is adopted and a comparative research on the students' motivations on adopting CC is conducted, who are from those two cultural circles. As the Motivation Theory is mature and of many minor theories, this paper focuses on the comparative studies of the internal motivations and external motivations. The statistics of the survey shows that, before adopting CC, foreign learners generally had hold rather high curiosity towards CC, and the curiosity of students from the NSCC is even higher. Students from those two cultural circles do not possess significant difference in the internal motivations either in adopting CC or in carrying on to study it. Yet there is significant difference in external motivations in both adopting CC and carrying on learning it and students from SCC show higher motivation than those from the NSCC. It is also found that after learning CC, students possess rather high sense of success in this subject. At the end of the paper, some pedagogical proposals are also raised. This study shall be of both theoretical and practical value for TCSL CC teaching.