Use Of Storytelling As A Chinese Teaching Method At Korean Elementary Schools

Since1992, when China and Korea established diplomatic relations, the two countrieswere becoming closer and closer and now are interwined in politics, economy and on manyother levels. That is why more and more people in Korea study Chinese, furthermore, beingable to speak Chinese fluently became an important skill when looking for employment incertain areas. There are both Chinese lessons and Chinese language university majors andmany students study Chinese as early as from elementary school.There are Chinatowns in majority of big cities. Some shops in InCheon for example,which is also known as "Chinese small town", only use Chinese. Here Koreans can come incontact with Chinese life style and culture. Under these circumstances, where the ability tospeak Chinese and understanding Chinese culture is becoming more and more importantlearning Chinese from a very young age is gradually becoming more and more popular.Elementary students when compared to adults and older children are much better atlearning foreign languages. However, due to the quite late emergence of Chinese lessons atKorean elementary schools, research in this area is not sufficient. The same goes fortextbooks, which are lacking in variety. Majority of them rely on children’s songs and games.This is why I have chosen elementary school Chinese teaching as my research topic, I want tointroduce a new method, learning through storytelling.Although this method has already been used in many other areas, it has not been usedfor Chinese teaching. In our research we will first provide and insight on the overallelementary school Chinese teaching situation, which will be followed by research andinstructions on how to prepare a lesson plan as well as how to use it.I strongly believe that research in this area is very meaningful. In the first chapter wewill focus on goals and meaning of our research, we will also introduce the research methodswe will use and analyze research that has been done to date. In the second chapter we will focus on the theoretical part of our research: Definition of storytelling, its specifics and effectivity of this method. In the third chapter we will focus on the order in which education by storytelling should proceed. Important are the criteria for choosing stories, compilation, editing, tool s which teachers can use and also the correct teaching order. In the fourth chapter we will becreating a lesson plan and also provide examples. Our last step will be to sum up the contentof our thesis, have another look on the effectivity of our method as well as overall Chinese teaching. There are still many problems existing in elementary school Chinese teaching, through this thesis we wish to contribute to research in this area and mitigate some of the existing problems.