The Evaluation Of The Korean Textbook For Teaching Chinese To Children

Since the communication between Korea and China is developing at the moment, the number of people in Korea willing to learn Chinese is growing as well. Moreover the age at which Koreans get in touch with Chinese language and culture is getting younger and younger. Extracurricular activities at primary schools are often dedicated to learning Chinese language. More workbooks for very young learners of Chinese language occur in the bookshops, but there are not so many workbooks that might be appropriate for youngsters or be interesting to them.This research on the basis of Childhood Education explains and clarifies the feasibility and effectiveness of teaching foreign language to children. In order to make such education more effective, we need to take into consideration the children’s features and their interests, and only then develop and design a proper workbook for them.In this paper we analyzed three workbooks among the teaching materials for children:儿童汉语boomboom)》(Chinese for kids Boomboom)、《开新儿童汉语》(Chinese for kids with fun)、《快乐汉语》(Happy Chinese). All three are edited and designed for children by different editors. All three are different in terms of structure, difficulty, percentage of exercises etc. We analyzed their structure, vocabulary, communication skills, exercises, cultural info etc. Afterwards on this basis we found out the shortcomings and advantages of every workbook, and then proposed some ways to improve teaching materials for kids, who learn Chinese.The conclusion of this paper states that workbooks that actually designed especially for kids and according to kids’characteristics are more useful and suitable for children. The editors of workbooks providing a rich educational experience should always pay attention to all four components of a language:listening, reading, writing and speaking. The vocabulary should be something of kids’interest; editors should also avoid too difficult lexicon and grammar. The most important point is that such workbooks should provide real and vivid way for communication as well as multicultural content. At this point the workbooks on learning Chinese for Korean kids lack systematic approach, they are simply not as useful as they could be. It’s time to create a better workbook for learning Chinese language.If we compare the above-mentioned workbooks to similar English learning materials, the later is more systematic and effective. Chinese learning materials for children still have quite a few shortcomings and overall problems. But we believe with proper researches on this topic it can be changed for the better in the nearest future.