Research On Character Tables In Chinese Teaching Syllabus For Secondary Schools In France

Chinese character is a combination of sound, form and meaning, thus there is a certain particularity in the aspects of reading, writing and recognition. As the characters of Chinese language are completely different from the words of English, French and other alphabetic languges, the teaching of characters has always been the most difficult in Chinese teaching.With the "Chinese fever" and the international promotion of Chinese, remarkable achievements overseas has been made. Compared to other countries, France has been leading in the development of Chinese language teaching. With a long history of Chinese language teaching, France has achieved rapid development with a large size of learners. And with rich teachig experiences, French has formed the Chinese teaching tradition with attaching great importance to the characters.In the1980s, the sinologists led by Bellassen first proposed the concept of "character based" Chinese teaching, and compiled many textbooks with great emphasis on Chinese characters(sinograms) learning and teaching, via the character-to-word approach permitted by the character-formation function. In France, the teaching of Chinese characters follows the "character based" teaching philosophy, emphasizes on the features of the the characters. According to the usage frequency of Chinese characters, the word-building capacity, the characteristics of learners, they divide the Chinese characters into two catagories, namely "active characters" and "passive characters " and then make out five character tables aiming for the different learners taking Chinese as the first, a second or a third foreign language in the teaching syllabus, which provides clear guidance to Chinese language teaching in France.This paper gives an introduction of the Chinese teaching syllabus for secondary schools in France and makes detailed statistical analysis on the five character tables contained. In this paper, according to the analysis results and the situation of learners, some referential strategies for Chinese character teaching and learning are presented.