Chinese Characters Classroom Activity Design At Thai Secondary Schools

Chinese teaching in Thailand has been growing more and more since the Sino-Thai relationship was established. More and more Thai students learn Chinese. It can be said Chinese courses are offered at almost every school in Thailand. But the Chinese language curriculum in Thailand doesn’t attach great importance to the methods associated with teaching Chinese characters. Nowadays, Thai secondary school Chinese language curriculums are largely characterized by repetitive reading and writing methods, with teachers often times focusing on writing and recognizing the characters. However, students tend to have a difficult time remembering the words because they mostly rely on the phonetic, spoken language when learning Chinese. So the classroom teaching environment becomes boring and makes it difficult to stimulate students’interest in Chinese characters, making it challenging for instructors to teach Chinese characters, and difficult for students to learn them.Throughout her three years of teaching Chinese language, the author has observed Thai students learning Chinese characters with great difficulty. With this in mind, the author designed 10 engrossing activities for teaching Chinese characters, including strokes of a Chinese character, strokes, radicals, character components, component assembly units, and configurations. These activities were designed in order to let the students learn Chinese characters effectively, to cultivate students’self-confidence in learning Chinese characters, and to improve students’interest in Chinese language. Each activity design considers the characteristics of Chinese characters, the teaching of Chinese characters at Thai secondary schools, and the difficulty of teaching Chinese characters at Thai secondary schools. The subjects of the study are Mathayom 4 (Grade 10) and Mathayom 5 (Grade 11) Chinese major students at Yothinburana School in Bangkok, Thailand.The methods of study were pre-test, post-test, and an opinion survey. The test results show that the class using the specially designed methods for teaching Chinese characters produces results relatively greater than those using ordinary methods. Furthermore an investigative questionnaire and interview was used to measure the students’attitude towards the use of the specially designed methods. The data of the investigation shows that many teaching methods focused on activities related to Chinese characters are very much conducive to the capacity for remembering and writing Chinese characters. At the same time, these useful activities can help interest students in learning the Chinese language, as well as improve the effectiveness of the education of Chinese characters for Thai students.