Thai Children Chinese Characters Teaching Activity Design

In recent years, With the great interest of the Chinese language fever in the world, the strategy of Chinese international development has switched from teaching Chinese as a foreign language to Chinese international popularization. By the support of the Thai-Chinese governments,"The Chinese language fever" trend is really very popular in Thailand nowadays. It is said that the Chinese courses are offered in almost every school. And all the language training centers have even given the Chinese curriculums in succession.A large number of children have increasingly studied it. Teachers and students focus their attention upon the Chinese teaching method for children by degrees.Especially for the teaching of the Chinese characters.Over a long period of time, Because the education of the Chinese language in Thailand doesn’t attach great importance to the teaching methods of Chinese characters, as a result, the research on them is rather a weak point. However if we want to make further progress in the teaching Chinese language for the foreigners in Thailand, we ought to pay close attention to the teaching methods of the characters also. Above all, one should give priority to the studying of Chinese characters in case we want to study it well. It is considered as one of the most difficult points in learning it, though. At present, the way of learning Chinese characters for Thai students may largely count on writing and recognizing them again and again so the atmosphere of teaching and studying in the classroom is apparently dull and boring. And there are no fascinating approaches in teaching students. For this reason, it is so hard to stimulate their interest in learning the characters. In addition, the Chinese characters are composed of pictography, sound and meaning altogether; thus, it is necessary for learners to rely on their faculty of memory in recognizing, remembering their pronunciation and rules of writing only. So Thai students who getting used to combining sounds into syllables as in Thai language don’t always become accustomed to it vey much, and there are substantial quantities of Chinese characters, combined with the complication of their strokes in writing. With all these grounds, it is inevitably difficult to teach or even study them. Apart from all the reasons of the hardness of the Chinese characters itself as I have said before. Perhaps there will be certain factors resulting from the students themselves also. For example, Thai students don’t have the habit of revising the lessons and practicing writing them everyday. Although they may have a very good memory, they could sooner or later forget them all. Moreover, they get used to the relaxing way of study. All of these reasons may cause the results of teaching and studying the Chinese characters are not likely to be favourable.Through my experiences in teaching Chinese characters for many years, I have observed to see the difficulties in characters learning for Thai students. Therefore, I have tried to design some of the engrossing characters-orientated teaching activities which consist of about8activities in my thesis. All of these have two big assortments of contents, that is to say, one is the recognizing of the characters and the other is the writing one. On the basis of the distinguishing features of Chinese characters and that of Thai students learning the Chinese language, following the principles of education of Chinese language on Characters,including the conduct of various characters-orientated activities in the process of realistic, practical teaching and learning. I think that those could more or less heighten the students’ confidence in learning Chinese characters.I have carried on the research on the practical teaching methods by using of a variety of these eight teaching activities for two classes of students, the first and the fifth grade of elementary school pupil of "Phadungkitwittaya" school. The lists of the teaching activities are as followed:1. Finding friends2. Where am1?3. The competition of finding vocabularies4. Bingo5. Domino6. Finding a number of strokes in a Chinese characters.7. What characters do I write?8. The order of strokes in calligraphy I dislike. One class of students did all of these activities, while the other used the conventional methods of teaching. And after that I gave the students some tests to see the effect of teaching. The test results were the class using the many different kinds of teaching methods of characters provided more relatively good results than those using the ordinary ones. Furthermore, I have made an investigation by questionnaire and interview that made me understand the students’attitudes towards the use of the characters activities in the classroom as well as the Chinese teachers’point of view about the condition of teaching characters and its activity in Thailand. The data of investigation showed that many teaching methods emphasized on Chinese characters activity are very much conducive to the capacity for remembering and writing Chinese characters for students. And at the same time, These useful activities can promote the interest in learning the Chinese language, along with the effectiveness of the education on Chinese characters for Thai students.I hope that my dissertation on the Chinese characters can use as references and be useful to develop the methods of teaching and learning the Chinese characters in Thailand and any other countries that use the combination of sounds into syllables.