A Study Of Instructional Design Of Chinese Characters For European And American Students

How to make the teaching of Chinese character more pointed, and improve the teaching effect of Chinese character towards European and American students is a problem which needs to be solved at present. Instructional design offers a good perspective for studying the teaching of Chinese character towards European and American students, for it combines teaching object and teaching contents into the process of teaching organization. Teaching is a series of designed events which supports learner's internal studying process.In order to ensure teaching's validity, we must reasonably design these events. This thesis studies the instructional design of Chinese character towards European and American students with the help of the theory of instructional design.The first part of this thesis analyzes European and American students'features in learning Chinese character. At the beginning, they have to adapt themselves to Chinese character's two dimensional structure. They tend to rely on grapheme for pronunciation, and take phrase as recognizing unit without remembering single character. Besides, European and American students'features in learning grapheme, pronunciation and meaning of character, and factors in information processing are all what should be considered in instructional design of Chinese character on the part of learners.The second part of this thesis analyzes the teaching contents of instructional design of Chinese character towards European and American students. The general aim of teaching character is the guiding principle of instructional design and the basis of arranging teaching contents. Character is a combination of pronunciation, grapheme, and meaning, and seizing its features means seizing the key of teaching character. Based on the guiding principle and features of characters, this thesis points out that, we should emphasize the knowledge of characters, and, at the beginning, enhance the teaching of grapheme, realize the combination of teaching character and phrase, and pay special attention to phonograms which represent both pronunciation and meaning and occupy a large proportion of Chinese characters.The analysis of teaching object and contents is the basis for any instructional design. After discussing the influencing factors in European and American students' studying characters and relevant teaching contents, this thesis analyzes the product of instructional design-textbooks and examines the instructional design of them. Results show that the instructional design of these textbooks, to some extent, takes European and American students'features in studying characters into account, while at the same time shows differences in the arrangement of teaching contents, the width and depth of teaching contents and the design of exercises. The existence of these differences is the result of partial understanding of European and American students' features in studying characters. At last, this thesis proposes four principles in instructional design of characters.