What Is the
Goal of Teaching Characters?
Dongdong Chen
Associate Professor,
How many
characters should learners of Chinese know before achieving Chinese proficiency?
What does it really mean by “knowing” Chinese characters? How many characters
should be taught in a semester? How should the instructor teach characters so
that learners will make a steady progress as expected? Why do learners quickly forget
the characters just learned? As Chinese language teachers, we think about these
questions constantly and always try hard to seek satisfactory answers. This
presentation will address some of these questions with an aim to obtain a
better understanding of the purpose of teaching and learning Chinese
characters. Through an analysis of some classical works, for example, “Why
Johnny Can’t Read Chinese” by DeFrancis (1966) and “Effects
of Time Lag in the Introduction of Characters into the Chinese Language
Curriculum” by Packard (1990), we will focus on the following two: (i) what is the goal of teaching Chinese characters; (ii) is
it true that the more characters learners know, the better their Chinese. In so doing, we hope to reflect on the issues
related to the teaching and learning of Chinese in general as well as the studying
of characters in particular.