Study On Recognition Of Chinese Characters By Thai University Students

Chinese characters have always been one of the difficulties that both students and teachers of Chinese encounter. For this reason, the problem of Chinese character instruction has been a topic of investigation by many specialists. One of the main methods of increasing the effectiveness of Chinese character instruction is conducting research from the perspective of learning, namely observing how students learn Chinese characters. This method is also an important clue to the principles employed by students in learning Chinese characters. This research investigates character recognition by Thai students using quantitative experimental methods, with participation of Thai university students as experimental subjects. The experimental design of this investigation focuses on three elements of character recognition including the sound, the meaning, and the form of Chinese characters. This study employs such statistical method as Variance Analysis, and Bivariate Analysis to analyze the data from the experiment. It also classifies and analyzes character-recognition errors.The results of this experiment are the following: 1) Level of Chinese proficiency and character frequency are two important factors in Chinese character recognition by Thai students. For pronunciation recognition, transparency of the phonetic components only plays a role for recognizing infrequent characters. For meaning recognition, transparency of the semantic component has almost no effect on the students. For form recognition, character category is an important factor in character recognition by Thai students while character-structure is a factor only for students who have reached a certain level of Chinese proficiency. 2) Thai students'ability to recognize Chinese characters increases as the students'level of Chinese proficiency increases. An analysis of the students'correct and wrong responses shows that their recognition tends to become more accurate. 3) The development of character awareness by Thai students is basically a gradual process, but the development, especially with respect to awareness of character form and meaning, often stops because students encounter obstacles, are too apprehensive, or use evasive methods. 4) Thai students'mastery of character form is the strongest, their mastery of character pronunciation in the middle, and their mastery of character meaning is the weakest. 5) Character form influences discrimination of character pronunciation and meaning by Thai students to a certain degree.Furthermore, this study compares the results from this experiment to results from other studies and summarizes characteristics of Chinese character recognition by Thai students. By analyzing and comparing these experimental results, this study concludes with suggestions for instruction of Chinese characters to speakers of Thai, which will serve as reference for research on character instruction and teaching of the Chinese language in Thailand.