South Korea And Russia, Chinese Learning Strategy Investigation And Comparative Analysis

Despite the increasing abundance of research in the acquisition of Chinese as a second language, undue attention is paid to the study in aspect of acquisition of Chinese characters. In language education, teaching and learning are two aspects in an inseparable and dialectical relationship. The present thesis is a study of strategy application status in the acquisition of Chinese character by overseas students who belong respectively to Chinese characters rim and non-Chinese character rim. It takes as subject Korean and Russian students of International Cultural Education College, Heilongjiang University and employs questionnaires as investigation method. In light of the collected data, the study, taking information processing and meta-cognitive theory as framework, makes an analysis of the similarities and differences in two groups of students in terms of strategy use in learning Chinese characters. The purpose of the study is to find some traits and regular patterns in overseas students as belonging to two vastly different language rims so as to offer tentative guidelines to Chinese characters learning and shed light on the teaching of Chinese characters.The main finding of the study is that there are both similarities and differences in the Korean and Russian overseas students in terms of cognition and the extent of acquaintance with common knowledge of Chinese characters. In general, the strategy Korean students most frequently resort to is compensation, followed in order by social, cognitive, meta-cognitive, memory strategies. And the affective strategy is the one of least use in resources. In contrast, the order of strategy application by Russian students is: cognitive, compensation, memory, meta-cognitive, social and affective strategies. There is significance in both groups of students in the use of memory, cognitive, social and affective strategies. On the basis of the investigation results, the present study offers its tentative suggestions as oriented to different cultural group of students in the aspects of learning strategies training and Chinese character teaching.