Exploration And Practices In The Teaching Of Literacy To Lower Grade Primary School Pupils

As the cornerstone of the Chinese culture and education, Chinese characters embody our over 6000 years of civilization and are the carriers of Chinese culture. In China, literacy teaching evolves with Chinese characters. It is of great significance to teach six-year-old kids literacy. Before and after liberation, the total number of characters taught was less and the reading speed was slower; after the founding of the People's Republic of China, our literacy teaching at the primary school level has made great progress. Since 1960s, scores of literacy teaching patterns—from the intensive literacy teaching to the latest-multimedia literacy teaching—have been adopted in China. Even if literacy teaching at the primary school level has developed quickly, there still remain quite a few problems, such as, mechanical literacy teaching, separating characters from reading, partial evaluation and the resulting too much workload for pupils. These problems have substantially hindered children's literacy development in China.The investigation and analysis of the problems concerned with literacy education reveal that the guidelines for and theoretical studies on literacy teaching, teachers' professional qualifications and teaching environment are the main factors affecting the scientific literacy teaching. At present, it is a common phenomenon that primary school Chinese teachers are lacking in knowledge on the underlying culture of Chinese characters and know little about educational psychology. In addition, inappropriate educational orientation does great harm to literacy teaching too. Worst of all, conceptions on the obsoleteness of Chinese characters and the influence of Cultural Revolution exerted devastating influence on the teaching of Chinese characters. Therefore, many resulting literacy teaching methods, which are either utilitarian or partial, have seriously restricted the development of literacy teaching.The findings of this research demonstrate that literacy teaching reform has become inevitable. On the basis of what has already been achieved in literacy teaching, the author suggests that necessary measures should be taken to change the situation for the better. Suggested measures are as follows:adopting scientific outlook of literacy teaching; furthering theoretical research on scientific literacy teaching; improving teachers'professional qualifications; scientifically integrating different teaching methods with the help of modern teaching aids. Scientific educational ideology and teaching methods are the key to improving the efficiency of literacy teaching and thus achieving the best result.