The Application Of Chinese Character Teaching Method In The Primary Stage Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Chinese characters are different from alphabetic characters with its own characteristics. Chinese character teaching to foreigners has been long considered as a major difficulty in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. To solve the difficulties in teaching Chinese characters, the Component Teaching Method was adopted for Chinese character teaching to foreigners in this paper. Component is the structure of Chinese characters between strokes and the whole word, it is mainly divided into components which words can be formed and those that words can't be formed. Component Teaching Method is to teach component itself and functions of forming words. It is a method that Chinese characters are divided into three levels of strokes, components, and the whole word. It considers that components are composed of strokes and the whole words are formed by components. In order to help primary learners to master structures of Chinese characters and reduce difficulties of learning Chinese characters, components teaching method was used to the teaching of Chinese characters during the course of teaching practice in Northwest University of Technology. Because its strong ideographic, components-cored teaching method meets learner's cognitive rules and easy to remember, easy to operate and use. There are some advantages in the teaching of Chinese characters.Because teaching objects own different background of Chinese characters and they have learned Chinese for one and a half months and know a little Chinese, so new Chinese characters were presented on the basis of old ones in components teaching of Chinese characters. Some Chinese characters that have been learned in the first volume of Chinese Course were chosen to cut their components under the guidance of Wang Ning's Theory of Components. Sounds, structures and meanings were first taught and new combinations of characters were formed by the components until similar types of Chinese characters were mastered. Teaching practice shows that the efficient way is to use Components Teaching Method mainly and Strokes Teaching Method is also taught as a supplement. Those with strong ability to form words should be learned first. Better teaching results will be got from combinations of sounds, structures and meanings.To test the effect of Components Teaching Method, some homework of foreign students was collected as a written data. Analysis results show that three types of errors are easily made by foreign students in Chinese characters writing. They are components leakage, reverse components and self-made components. These errors in Chinese characters writing can be reduced by the emphasis on the teaching of components. Influenced by the expression of limited Chinese, the interview with foreign students is very simple. But it also reflects their great interest of Components Teaching Method, most of them think that mastery of the method can help to memorize the Chinese characters, and try to use it in their future study of Chinese characters.