Research On Middle- And High-Level Korean Chinese Learners’ Grasp Of Isomorphic Morphemes

Lexical teaching is an important part in the field of foreign language teaching, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language included. As a result, specific lexical teaching methods have been well researched over the years, and the recent focus has shifted to using "morpheme" to better Chinese vocabulary teaching.Chinese vocabulary is basically comprised of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest combination of voice and semantic. In modern Chinese, there are not many polysyllabic morphemes, and most of them are monosyllabic. Usually a Chinese morpheme is written in the form of a character. Sometimes a morpheme can act as a word alone, while other times it has to be combined with other morphemes so as to form an independent word. But what always remains the same is that each morpheme has its own meaning, and this is what differentiates it from other morphemes, based on which Chinese morphemes can be categorized according to their various forms, voice and semantic.Korea belongs to the circle of Chinese culture, which certainly brings some edges to Korean Chinese learners compared with their European counterparts who have never been in contact with characters before in that the majority of Chinese culture countries have once adopted or are still using Chinese as their official language, in addition to which almost all of them are deeply influenced by Chinese culture over thousands of years; therefore how to take advantage of this benefit to the utmost becomes a problem that every Korean Chinese learners must be capable of tackling. Up until now, the most common method they adopt remains "memorizing by chunks" characterized by blindly and quickly memorizing Chinese new characters because they lack the fundamental knowledge of "morpheme". As a consequence, they easily reach a "plateau", at which point their Chinese language acquisition and proficiency alike just stop improving, and the duration of this "plateau" varies according to different students’ way of dealing with it. Sometimes the "plateau", if badly handled, can last forever, completely forming a bottleneck impeding any prospective improvement. Thus Korean Chinese learns are in desperate need of efficient learning method, which must be suitable for Korean Chinese learners as well as Chinese vocabulary. In my opinion, in order to enhance Chinese vocabulary acquisition of Korean students, it is imperative to include "morpheme" in Chinese teaching.In this essay, Chinese isomorphic morpheme is divided into three sections, the first being the "semantic-related morphemes with the same form and voice", the second being the "semantic-unrelated morphemes with the same form bur different voice", and the third being the "semantic-different morphemes with the same form and voice". The first section— "semantic-related morphemes with the same form and voice" is designed to find out whether Korean Chinese learners can differentiate among various entries of "monosyllabic polysemy"; the second section aims to find out whether learners can tell the difference among homographs; and the third section is expected to find out their grasp of meanings of ancient Chinese morphemes remaining in contemporary Chinese.This research aims at investigating middle- and high-level Korean Chinese learners’ grasp of Chinese morphemes. To be more specific, we hope to find out which part on earth they are good at, and which part exactly they are not and needs improving, based on which we will analyze and find out the causes, summarize the regular patterns, and at last we hope to offer some feasible suggestions regarding how to improve Chinese vocabulary learning using morphemes.The first chapter—introduction—is about the objective and specific research method of this study. The second chapter is the literature review. Based on the significance of vocabulary and morpheme teaching, the second chapter briefly introduces the current situation of Chinese vocabulary teaching and research in China as well as Korea. The third chapter involves information about the design of questionnaire, the respondents and process of the research. The core of designed questionnaire is "isomorphic morpheme", which is divided into three categories—"semantic-related morphemes with the same form and voice", "semantic-unrelated morphemes with the same form bur different voice", and "semantic-different morphemes with the same form and voice", as has been mentioned above. There are altogether 30 questions in the questionnaire, which is carried out in the form of written test. Respondents are middle- and high-level Korean Chinese learners. The fourth chapter is the analysis of research results. We also review the causes of high or low correction rate from various perspectives, besides which the results and flaws of this study are presented. The fifth chapter offers specific suggestions on enhancing Chinese vocabulary learning for Korean students.Informed by the study, we reach the following conclusions:firstly, Korean students’ grasp of Chinese morphemes improves as their Chinese proficiency improves; secondly, Among the three sections, "semantic-different morphemes with the same form and voice"is the most conspicuous weakness of Korean students, the main reason being that they do not fully grasp the specific meanings of certain ancient Chinese words.Despite some inevitable shortcomings of this research, we hope that its result can be conducive to research on morpheme-teaching in the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, especially to the research on how to better the lexical-teaching of Korean students.