The Study Of Chinese Character Stroke Order In Elementary School Students

The topic of this research is the study of Chinese character stroke order in elementary school students.The study of Chinese language leads to cultural learning including the culture of Chinese character writing. Chinese character is said to be the uniqueness of its language; hence, students need to learn the stroke order of writing character in order to beautify their writing and to preserve its trait of uniqueness. As a result, there should be a research focusing on Chinese character stroke order. According to the findings, basically we can distinguish the stroke ordering into 7 methods: horizontal before vertical; diagonals right-to-left before diagonals left-to-right; top before bottom; left before right; outside before inside; inside before enclosing; and center stroke before wings. The objective of this research is to study the stroke order writing in elementary school students; the samplings are grade 10-12 students of Hua Qiao Gong Hak School in Ubonratchathani Province, year 2011, semester 2 in the total number of 133 students– 36 from grade 10, 46 from grade 11 and 51 from grade 12. The results are that grade 11 students have the highest probability of writing correct stroke order of 96.27%, following by grade 10 students with the percentage of 92.80, and the lowest is grade 12 which scored 85.84%. Overall the students'stroke orderings are good; however, we have found that the order of outside to inside has the highest chance to create mistake for grade 10 students. The biggest error for grade 11 students is inside before enclosing, whereas the rules of left before right, inside before enclosing and center before wings seem to be problematic for grade 12. These problems cause the obstacle in writing character and its strokes. The results can be used to improve the teaching of Chinese stroke order; furthermore, it can be utilized in developing Chinese language education and the ability of understanding the roots of problems, thus, finding the correct solutions in order to generate the efficiency in Chinese character writing.