Turkish Students' Writing Errors Analysis

This thesis is an analysis of errors in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and compiles a large amount of data of Chinese Characters written by Turkish students and links the writer’s personal studying experience, and analyzes the errors of Turkish Students’ Writing of Chinese Characters and provides reasons explaining these errors. Further more, this thesis provides suggestions to adapt Chinese character teaching methods to Turkish students.When writing Chinese characters, Turkish students make most of their mistakes in the Character components.48%of the errors found in Character writing are related to the character components,37%are related to the stroke order, and15%are related to the character as a whole. The character component errors can be divided in4types:57%of these errors are changes in the component,14%are an addition of a component,10%of these errors are the removal of a component and19%of these errors are alterations of the component. Stroke order errors can be divided in3types:41%of stroke order errors are in the number of strokes,39%of the errors are in the shape of the strokes; and20%of these errors are in relationship between the strokes. As for errors in the character as a whole,56%of these errors are similar character shapes,39%are pronunciation and character mistakes and5%are pronunciation errors.As for the reason for the mistakes, this thesis provides3factors involved:the particularity integral of Chinese characters, the teaching methods used and the nature of the students learning the characters. Chinese characters are particular in that they are composed of complex character strokes and there are numerous homophonous characters, numerous components and irregularities. These reasons above are the main reasons causing the Turkish students to make mistakes in writing Chinese characters. Regarding the teaching methods used, not only do textbooks fail to teach the characters in a systematic way, but the curriculum also fails to have an independent method for teaching Chinese character writing, separate from grammar and pronunciation. Lastly, the curriculum does not take into account the background of its students:it is influenced by the Chinese teaching strategies and mechanisms used for Chinese children, which are not always appropriate for speakers of other languages.This thesis puts forward teaching solutions to cope with the errors Turkish students make, relating to three different aspects of the Chinese language:the stroke order of Chinese characters, the components and radicals and the characters as a whole. For teaching stroke order, we should start by looking at the shape of the character and the basic stroke techniques. From these principles we can teach students to deduct stroke orders. As for teaching the character components and radicals, we should teach the simple components first and move forward gradually to the more complicated components, while teaching the internal structures of characters as well as the recurrent regular patterns. Finally, we can draw a link between the character and its meaning, grammar, etc, and differentiate and analyze characters amongst themselves, to reach the final goal of teaching the Chinese characters, to enable the student to write characters correctly and minimize the multiple character writing errors involved in the process.