A Study On The Teaching Of Chinese Character Culture In Nigeria

One of the important features of Chinese characters is that it also acts as an important culture and information carrier,containing a lot of Chinese cultural and historical information.This characteristic of Chinese characters can be used to solve many problems that students often meet when learning Chinese characters.Learning Chinese characters has always been regarded as the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese language,especially for students from non-Chinese character countries such as Nigeria.As a result,many students spend a large percentage of their time in learning Chinese characters through re-writing of characters and cramming the characters.This is a method that loses its efficiency as students meet more complicated characters.They are then faced with problems such as recognizing wrong characters,misplacing strokes,writing wrong characters,etc.These problems are further compounded by the inability to truly recognize the meaning and structure of the characters.Hence there is the need to introduce diverse methods of teaching Chinese characters that would enhance the learning of Chinese characters.Using the cultural characteristics of Chinese characters will not only increase the students understanding of characters,it would also improve their knowledge of Chinese culture as well as the learning atmosphere.Thus,this thesis intends to research the current state of Chinese character culture teaching in Nigeria and the different methods that could be used to integrate Chinese character culture into the teaching curriculum in a bid to ensure an improvement in the quality of Chinese education in Nigeria.This thesis is consisted of five parts.The first chapter provides an introduction to the topic and the background of the research.It also covers an overview of previous researches on the topic,the significance of the research and the methods used to conduct the research.The second chapter introduces the status quo of Chinese character teaching in Nigeria.It also presents the information obtained in the survey and the results of the interview carried out by the writer.Following the analysis of the results from the survey and interview provided in the previous chapter,the third chapter outlines the problems in implementing teaching Chinese character culture and how these problems affect the efficiency of teaching and learning Chinese characters.It also provides solutions to the problems mentioned.The fourth part provides a number of strategies and methods that could be used to efficiently integrate the Chinese character culture into teaching Chinese characters.The last chapter summarizes the thesis.At the end of the thesis,a lesson plan was also provided.This design is based on the above discussion,taking into account teaching materials,teaching difficulties,methods and processes,hence putting into practice the information summarized in the previous sections of the thesis.