A Survey Of Ghanaian Students Chinese Character Learning Strategies

With the increasing influence of Chinese in the world,the number of Chinese learners is also increasing.However,learners from different countries belong to different language backgrounds and their mother tongue is quite different from Chinese.Most of these learners use alphabets when writing(Pinyin)while Chinese characters are ideographic characters.This different writing systems and methods make the learning of Chinese difficult.For this reason,many studies in recent years have focused on the study of foreign students' Chinese character learning strategies,since Chinese character learning is an important part of teaching Chinese as a second language.Taking Ghanaian students as the research participants,this study adopted questionnaire and focus group discussion method,using meta-cognitive and cognitive strategies as the theoretical basis to investigate Ghanaian students' motivation,attitude and difficulties in Chinese language learning.The differences between gender and the most commonly used Chinese character learning strategies among students of different levels were summarized to obtain the most frequently used Chinese character learning strategies of Ghanaian students and base on the results of the analysis,suggest the best teaching method suitable for Chinese character teaching and learning in Ghana.The results of this study indicates that,Ghanaian students are highly motivated to learn the Chinese language because they are motivated by their interested in the Chinese culture,they want to make friends and do business with Chinese people,and also find good jobs in the future because of their Chinese language proficiency.In terms of attitude,the students think that learning Chinese characters is very important but very difficult.Their main difficulties lie in their inability to remember the Chinese characters,strokes order and the pronunciation of the characters.Secondly,with regards to the students use of the Chinese character learning strategy,the most frequently used strategies for students at the foundational and elementary levels include monitoring strategy,phonetic-semantic strategy and memory strategy,where as those at the intermediate level includes the monitoring strategy,phonetic-semantic strategy and planning strategy.It was also found that with a mean of 3.0 and above,the most frequently used strategies for Ghanaian students included monitoring strategy,phonetic-semantic strategy and memory strategies,and the least used is planning strategies.Although there was no difference in the use of Chinese character learning strategies between gender,but with a mean of 3.0 and above,girls employed more Chinese character learning strategies when learning Chinese characters than boys.