On March 27th, 2018, Prof. Andreas Guder, German Director of the Academic Confucius Institute of University of Göttingen and President of the Association of Chinese Language Teaching in German-speaking Countries (FaCh), was invited to give an academic lecture entitled Research on Chinese Characters Teaching Methods for Adult Learners to students and teachers in BLCU.
Prof. Andreas Guder believes that since the writing system of European languages mainly consists of letters, Chinese characters have not been given enough attention for a long time in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and the complexity has always been underestimated. In his speech, he shared the method of using learners’ mother languages to introduce the Chinese characters and help improve the adult learners’ character recognition ability. Prof. Andreas Guder also distinguished the Chinese “oral language ability” from the “writing language ability”, arguing that “graphemic competence” is to writing language ability what “phonemic competence” is to oral language ability. He noted that “graphemic competence” is a prerequisite for Chinese language learners to improve their reading and writing ability. Taking the European Benchmarking Chinese Language (EBCL) as an example and the “Sinographemic Competence Reference” in EBCL as the standard, Prof. Guder introduced in detail the knowledge of the Chinese character system that European Chinese learners should master at different levels in order to maintain the motivation and effectiveness of their study.
