What Is the Goal of Teaching Characters?

Dongdong Chen

Associate Professor, Seton Hall University

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.