Investigation Of Foreign Students' Ability Of Typing In Chinese

The ability of typing in Chinese is a part of the information processing ability of Chinese characters. Handwriting Chinese characters has been gradually replaced by printed Chinese characters in many areas as typing in Chinese is more convenient and more efficient than writing.For Chinese as a second language learners, it is important to acquire typing skills in Chinese as handwriting skills could not be meet the needs of social development any more. Researches about the foreign students' ability of typing in Chinese, especially for the current situation and evaluation standard, are still very scarce. Therefore, it is necessary and innovative to conduct the investigation of foreign students' ability of typing in Chinese and figure up a standard of typing ability of Chinese.There are 60 foreign students, as experimental subjects for the research, coming from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia.The experiments are about the investigation of accuracy of typing( including the accuracy of Chinese characters, the accuracy of punctuation, the accuracy of article format)and the speed of typing in Chinese of foreign students. The result shows that the accuracy rate of Chinese characters is 96.90% and the accuracy rate of punctuation is94.82%; the accuracy rate of article format is 65.82%, which is far lower than the accuracy of Chinese characters and punctuation. The speed of typing in Chinese is 0.38 characters per second(23 characters per min).Most students are in "good" and "excellent" level of accuracy Chinese characters as well as punctuation accuracy. More than 60% subjects are in "failed" level of article format accuracy. 70% of the subjects are in "elementary" level of typing speed in Chinese. After comprehensive analysis, we found that students performed better in typing Chinese characters and punctuations than adjusting the article format; what's more,the typing speed of students is in the low-intermediate level, which is remained to be improved.In this article, we analyzed the factors that affects the ability of typing in Chinese, such as Chinese level(measured by HSK), the daily length of typing practice, time in China, native language background and gender. At last, we made some suggestions to improve the ability of typing in Chinese for foreign students, which included improving students' ability of Chinese characters application, speaking in Chinese as more as possible and improving students' average daily typing timetaken, increasing typing in Chinese pratices in Chinese characters class,etc.. We suggested to include the ability of typing in Chinese into the Chinese language proficiency scales, which can be use as measure of the ability of typing in Chinese for foreign students and completed the system of the Chinese character application ability.