An Investigation Of The Common Mistakes Of Foreign Students From Thailand Lacking A Prior Foundation In The Chinese Language

This thesis mainly investigates erroneous Chinese characters written by Thai students with no prior Chinese language foundation who are currently studying Chinese in China. The writer compiled a large quantity of test materials by tracking Thai students who were taught by the author for one semester. Through statistical analysis of the materials, the writer obtained the frequency of erroneous Chinese characters written by her students, and selected those with the highest frequencies for further analysis. After further sorting these Chinese characters into single and compound characters, the author analyzed them separately; for single characters, the author analyzed them from the perspective of whether the characters are recognizable; for compound characters, the two main kinds of errors are errors in strokes and errors in components. For errors in strokes, the author sorted them into errors in omission, errors in adding, mistaken strokes and compositional errors; for errors in components, the author separated mistakes in radicals from mistakes in the word components. Lastly, the author also proposes teaching advice based on the author’s personal classroom experience.