An Analysis Of Chinese Characters Learning Performance And Errors Made By Students In Malaysia-Based International Schools

This is an article to study intermediate level students' learning of Chinese characters in a Malaysian International Primary School.The Chinese writing exercise books of intermediate level students from Grade One to Six are collected for the purpose of statistical analysis of Chinese character writing errors,in order to analyze the students'Chinese characters writing,and understand the writing habits and problems encountered by students learning Chinese as a second language.Meanwhile,interviews have also been conducted with the Chinese teachers at Sri Kuala Lumpur Primary School,which are eight in total to understand the students' Chinese characters learning performance in class,including both reading and writing.In addition,the author herself is also teaching Chinese characters in class where the process of students reading and writing Chinese characters were observed.Using the above methods,the study offers a comprehensive understanding of the students' Chinese characters learning in class.Chinese is being taught as a second language at Sri Kuala Lumpur Primary School.So,with limited hours to master the language,the students often face problems in learning Chinese characters.When reading Chinese characters,they are unable to recognize the glyphs of the Chinese characters within a short time,articulate the pronunciations and grasp the meanings of the Chinese characters.Some students pronounce the Chinese characters in foreign accents and still fail to pronounce correctly even after being corrected many times by their teachers.Besides,various situations occurred throughout the students' process of learning to write Chinese characters.Some of them cannot remember the strokes of the Chinese characters,write without following the stroke order and the structure of the Chinese characters,and often end up "drawing"the characters instead of writing.These situations often arise in the Chinese character classes.Hence,this thesis will discuss mainly how the students read and write Chinese characters as well as how to resolve these problems and improve their ability to learn Chinese characters.There are six chapters in this thesis.The first chapter is the introduction,a part that puts forward the significance of the study.It summarizes the status quo of research in both Malaysia and abroad on students' Chinese characters reading and writing as well as explains the research methodology adopted in the study.The second chapter elaborates on the students' experiences in reading and memorizing Chinese characters and describes their performances in grasping the glyphs,pronunciations and meanings of Chinese characters.Furthermore,this chapter also analyzes the students' difficulties in remembering Chinese characters and provides some methods and suggestions to effectively enhance their memorization of Chinese characters.The third chapter is a statistical investigation about the students' Chinese characters writing process and their errors,offering an overview of the students' Chinese characters writing performance as well as calculating and categorizing the errors they made when writing Chinese characters.The teachers hand-picked the surveyed characters in this chapter from each grade and observed their students when they wrote Chinese characters in class.Then,the teachers identified the common mistakes from the students' exercise books,and counted the students' mistakes in writing Chinese characters.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes why the students made these mistakes when writing Chinese characters,with reasons including not understanding the structural meaning of Chinese characters,confusing the Chinese characters strokes,and disregarding the principles of writing Chinese characters.The reasons why the mistakes are made classified into the above three categories along with a detailed analysis.This chapter also touches on the impact of textbook arrangements on the students' Chinese characters learning experience.Viewing from this perspective,the paper analyzes the influence of the "speaking/listening-preceding-character-learning approach" textbooks and the "balanced approach" textbooks on second language learners.The content of Chapter Five is mainly to provide some suggestions to improve students' ability to learn Chinese characters.A few suggestions are offered on teaching methods,learning methods,textbook arrangement or selection in the hope that teachers and students can'upon adopting these suggestions,overcome their weaknesses and effectively improve their Chinese character learning ability.The final chapter is a conclusion summarizing and explaining the above research and its results.