從新加坡學生日常使用漢字字頻談新加坡華文課程與教學規劃

Abstract

Chinese educators in Singapore have long debated on the quantity of Chinese characters that students of Chinese as a second language should master and the effective sequence of teaching Chinese characters. The Chinese curriculum planning department in Singapore used to adopt one of two approaches to compile characters list for Chinese instructional materials: to either take reference from a character and word table published by local Chinese newspapers (such as Lianhe Zaobao’s word utility survey report), or to take reference from surveys of character lists in Chinese language curriculum conducted by individual academics from higher institutions. These corpus and texts may be scientifically researched, however, the language environment of local students may not have been taken into consideration, hence the language needs of the second language learners may not be fully reflected. To better solve the challenge of Chinese characters learning in Singapore's complex bilingual context, we should begin with the aspect of utilization of Chinese Characters (Hanzi) among local students. In other words, the development of Chinese curriculum and teaching materials has to be based on the actual living experience of local students and their reading interest. A systematic data collection and analysis of the most frequently used Chinese corpus can then follow before deciding on the appropriate quantity and teaching sequence of Chinese characters. To achieve the objective of learning Chinese characters for daily use, the author proposes to use a concept of Priority Index in the determination of teaching sequence of Chinese characters. The calculating process of the index will be discussed. Some ideas for future research will also be mentioned.