On Morphological Characteristics Of Modern Chinese Characters And Character Teaching In TCFL

Character Teaching in TCFL refers to the teaching of contemporary Chinese characters, which is the activity with foreigners as its objects, modern Chinese characters as its content, foreign language teaching as its method and enables the foreigners to master the skill of using Chinese characters and its ultimate goal.As the writing symbols recording Chinese language, Chinese Characters bare their own systems and hold their own structural rules. The teaching and learning of Chinese characters should be based on the morphological analysis, from which character meaning will be combined with its sound and therefore enable Chinese learners to bridge the gap between written and spoken Chinese.There three reasons for Chinese characters to be the bottleneck for the foreign students, especially those without Chinese cultural background; first is that we do not have a thorough understanding of Chinese morphological characteristics, second is that we have inadequate knowledge of Chinese character acquisition law of second language learners; last but not least, we as TCFL teachers have devoted less time doing exercises in teaching practice.This paper is based on the modern Chinese character theory and borrowed some structural linguistics and cognitive psychology perspectives. Having studied over 2905 characters in The Graded Character List, it maintains that modern Chinese characters, as the morpheme syllabic language of block building, consist of three symbols—semantic symbol, phonetic symbol and writing mark. The degree of the configurational basis of semantic symbols and phonetic symbols is less known because of semantic and phonetic changes. Having no relations with the morpheme or meaning and sound of words, recorded by modern Chinese characters, writing marks have lost their original of the degree of the configurational basis. Therefore the analysis of morphological parts--their positions, their structures and their meaning, should be of great emphasis.The paper also adopts questionnaires as quantitative analysis. It investigated theforeign students in the Overseas Education College of Xiamen University in order to know their learning strategies for cognizing and learning modern Chinese characters. Combing their acquisitional features, strategies and methods of teaching foreigners Chinese characters were also suggested.