Chinese character teaching methods in Chinese mother tongue lessons in Sweden

Sammanfattning

Mother tongue teaching (modersmålsundervisning) has started from the 1960s in Sweden and is open to the students with Chinese as mother tongue. Swedish Chinese mother tongue teaching is different from the overseas Chinese education considering of it is offered by the Swedish municipalities, for example, Stockholm municipality, Huddinge municipality and etc. One of the most fundamental aspects in Chinese teaching is Chinese characters teaching. How to teach Chinese characters is discussed heatedly not only in China but also overseas. With the previous research overview, it is found that there are numerous approved ways to teach Chinese characters but with very limited available information on the teaching methods used in mother tongue classes in Sweden and therefore I did the research about several selected methods to see which one is considered as most effective and preferred by both the students and teachers together with collecting brief background information of them. The research is done among the Chinese mother tongue teachers and the students who take part in the Chinese mother tongue lessons. The teaching methods are specific to teach Chinese characters’ pronunciation, formation, meaning and usage. The main research methods are snowball sampling and questionnaire. The results indicate that the majority of Chinese mother tongue teacher participants are with no teaching licenses in Sweden and lack of teacher professional education and not all the students use Chinese as the main home language. The language level can be varied. Additionally, although the most of the choices made by the teachers and students on the preferred teaching methods are overlapped but there are also different choices which draw the attention from the mother tongue teachers.