High dropout rates in secondary Chinese courses: are characters to be blamed?

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to explore the reasons for low retention rates among students in the Chinese classes in upper secondary education in the Czech Republic. The principal research question was whether Chinese characters were the main reason why many students decided to stop attending their Chinese classes. Semi-structured interviews with former and present secondary students of Chinese were employed in order to understand the students’ attitudes and beliefs regarding learning Chinese characters and the Chinese language in general. It was found that the characters did not deter students from continuing the class, even though they were perceived as challenging and difficult. On the contrary, they were typically the students’ favourite aspect of Chinese. A lack of personal motivation was identified as the main factor that differentiated the students who quit their Chinese course from their more successful counterparts.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• beliefs
• Chinese characters
• secondary education
• TCFL

Introduction

Czech speakers often metaphorically compare Chinese characters to ‘scattered tea leaves’. This view no doubt reflects lack of familiarity with the Chinese writing system whose characters are perceived as clusters of arbitrary lines with no perceptible principles of organisation, leading to the assumption that they are nearly impossible to fully master. This attitude is quite possibly not unique to Czech learners – Chinese characters have often been blamed for high dropout rates among novice students of Chinese in other countries as well (Jen and Xu 2000; Ren 2014). Such widespread beliefs may affect the expectations students bring to their language lessons (Horwitz 1988) and consequently, might even lead teachers to avoid teaching characters, hoping to reduce the cognitive load on their students (Ren 2014).

The prevailing number of character-related studies in TCFL has so far focused mainly on novice learners in American tertiary education (Ke 2020), while less attention has been paid to primary and secondary education levels. Furthermore, more studies have been conducted in English-speaking countries than among learners of other language backgrounds. Therefore, the learning environment in primary and secondary education in different countries calls for more research.

The learning style in primary and secondary schools differs significantly from that in universities – in terms of the learning pace, the level of learning independence, or the teachers’ requirements. A fitting example would be the reported lack of homework in Chinese courses in primary and secondary schools (Knell and West 2017; Li 2013). This presents a great challenge to the teachers particularly in the area of teaching Chinese characters, since hand copying is generally considered to be one of the most effective ways of memorising them (Lu, Ostrow, and Heffernan 2019) but excessive practice of handwriting during the lessons might lead to crossing the fine line between enjoyment and boredom.

Another distinctive feature of teaching Chinese in the lower educational stages is the fact that at many schools, Chinese has the status of an extracurricular activity. This means that there is fierce competition for students’ attention and limited after-school time between Chinese and a wide range of other activities. This also applies to the Czech Republic, where Chinese is mostly taught as the third foreign language and Chinese classes have only been established at a small number of secondary schools without a unified curriculum. The status of Chinese classes at these schools has been rather unstable especially due to a low retention rate of students.

This paper uses interviews with former and present students of Chinese to explore the relationships between the students’ perception of Chinese characters, their learning beliefs and motivation, and the dropout rates in secondary Chinese courses in the Czech Republic. Contributing to efforts to establish an effective Chinese curriculum that could be used by secondary schools aspiring to offer Chinese classes to their students, this study investigates whether characters are the main reason why students in upper secondary education discontinue learning Chinese and whether excluding them from the curriculum could help increase the retention of students.

Review of literature

Timing and methods of character instruction

The timing of character instruction is a topic that has been attracting researchers in the field of TCFL for many years. Several quantitative studies have been performed to determine whether early character instruction or delayed character instruction lead to better learning results.

One of the most cited studies was undertaken by Packard (1990) who concluded that providing university students with a three-week time lag in their character instruction led to a higher fluency in their oral production, while the reading and writing abilities remained unaffected. Knell and West (2017), on the other hand, found no significant differences in the oral production performance between the ‘early’ and ‘delayed’ group of secondary school learners, with the ‘early’ group in fact gaining a slightly higher score in the oral exam at the end of the second semester. The ‘early’ group also performed better in reading and writing. However, this could have been caused by a greater number of instructional hours, as pointed out by Krashen (2017).

Other authors have acknowledged the importance of teaching Chinese characters from the beginning and explored the differences between focusing on active character production or solely on recognition. Poole and Sung (2015) found the ‘focus on reading’ and ‘focus on writing’ approaches to be equally effective in teaching students how to recognise characters. Lu, Ostrow, and Heffernan (2019) suggested that spending too much time on active handwriting hindered students in the word acquisition process.

According to Li (2020), many Chinese scholars prefer teaching character recognition over active handwriting. One example would be the method suggested by Jiang (2007), where only a few characters were learned actively, and the time gained by reducing the amount of handwriting practice was used on practising character recognition instead. According to Jiang, such an approach helped to maintain the students’ interest in learning characters without leaving negative effects on the learning process and overall results. Ke (1996), meanwhile, found that learners do not need to have a complete memory of a character for its successful recognition, while for actively writing it, the memory must be flawless. Ke (1998) also noted that overwhelming students with character writing in the initial stages of learning could prove counterproductive.

Jen and Xu (2000) also noted the difficulty of writing characters from memory and identified the characters as the principal reason why students quit learning Chinese after only one year of studying. They proposed using computers for writing characters instead of traditional handwriting to increase student retention rates. The overemphasis on handwriting was also criticised by Allen (2008) who observed that spending too much time on learning how to handwrite characters in the initial stages of learning Chinese was an inefficient use of time. Allen noted that the skill of handwriting had been rendered obsolete in the Chinese cultural environment. However, at the same time he believed that students’ interest in learning how to write characters would never completely disappear. The students in the study carried out by Ye (2011) indeed preferred to write characters by hand and showed little interest in computer input methods. For this reason, Ye suggested that students should be encouraged to handwrite characters, but they should not be tested on handwriting them from memory.

Students’ attitudes and beliefs

Students’ attitudes and beliefs are an important topic of research in foreign language teaching in general. Students are presently regarded as active participants in the learning process and their attitudes should be considered when designing teaching methods (Horwitz 1999). As noted by Büyükyazi (2010), teachers should pay attention to their students’ beliefs to increase the effectiveness of their teaching techniques and strategies.

Authors of various studies in TCFL employ two principal tools to explore these attitudes and beliefs. One popular method is the instrument called ‘Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory’ (BALLI) designed by Horwitz (1988), presenting respondents with 34 statements, and using Likert scales to assess the level of agreement or disagreement. This tool was later modified by several researchers according to the specific characteristics of the Chinese language (Cui and Paulhus 2012; Yang 2015, 2018). Another widely used method which focuses on exploring learners’ attitudes in greater depth is the semi-structured interview. Several studies have been performed on teachers’ and students’ beliefs about teaching Chinese in general and Chinese characters in particular. They are listed in the following paragraphs according to the educational stages to which they relate.

Primary education

Walker and Poole (2016) in their study of US sixth graders investigated how immediate and delayed character instruction affects students’ attitudes. They observed that students wanted to learn Chinese characters, even though the ones learning only pinyin experienced less anxiety than their character-learning counterparts. Students felt that learning characters made their learning experience more authentic. Li (2013) studied the teachers’ and learners’ perceptions in the context of English primary schools and found that English pupils also expected to learn how to write characters in their lessons, but at the same time wanted their lessons to be entertaining. The need to establish a balance between work and entertainment and to adjust the teaching methods accordingly was also noted by Nel, Krog, and Lebeloane (2019) who studied fifth grade pupils in South Africa. According to their research, one of the greatest challenges for pupils of this age group is the repetitive character of writing practice which does not meet the entertainment criterion. Hu (2003) also conducted research on English primary school pupils and found that teaching characters did not, however, represent any major obstacle in the learning process.

Secondary education

Ping (2009) studied the reasons for the high dropout rate among students of Chinese in secondary schools in the UK and discovered that most of the students quit Chinese because of its perceived difficulty. Other reasons were mentioned, such as the boring teaching style of the teachers or a lack of possibilities for travelling to China. Cáceres-Lorenzo (2015) studied European teenage learners of Chinese and noted that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation play an important role in learning a language commonly perceived as difficult. Yang (2018) used the BALLI score developed by Horwitz to explore the beliefs lower secondary school pupils in the UK hold about Chinese characters. Pupils in the study expressed great enthusiasm for handwriting characters and Yang suggested that characters should be incorporated into the communicative language teaching plans for the Chinese language.

Tertiary education

Ye (2013) addressed the issue of beliefs about immediate and delayed character instruction in post-secondary programs in the US and discovered that the former method was significantly more common and preferred by the students. However, after being presented with the soundest arguments in favour of both methods, the number of students opting for delayed character instruction increased. Ye (2011) found that students attached more significance to handwriting than their teachers. They wanted to handwrite characters, but at the same time considered them to be the most difficult aspect of Chinese. Interestingly, students in this study favoured handwriting all characters they learned, while their teachers preferred to let them handwrite only some of the characters.

Cui and Paulhus (2012) studied the beliefs of university and college students in the US and Canada and found that students were more traditional in their beliefs than the teachers. While the communicative language teaching approach has become increasingly popular in recent years, learners in this study preferred more traditional methods consisting of grammar and vocabulary practice. Students in this study also believed that writing Chinese characters was important and that passive character recognition was not sufficient. According to Horwitz (1999), languages such as Japanese (or Chinese) attract learners who believe in more formal language learning methods and have more realistic expectations of the requirements of learning a more challenging language.

Building on the above-mentioned studies, this study aims to explore the reasons for low retention rates among the students of Chinese in Czech secondary education and the differences between successful and unsuccessful students of Chinese. By conducting in-depth interviews with seventeen secondary school students, it attempts to (1) answer the question whether Chinese characters are the principal reason why teenage students decide to quit learning Chinese, as suggested in some previous studies (Jen and Xu 2000; Ke, Wen, and Kotenbeutel 2001; Ren 2014), (2) gain a deeper understanding of the students’ attitudes and beliefs and how they might affect their learning and (3) put forward suggestions on establishing a successful secondary school Chinese language curriculum, increasing the retention of students in the process.

Methods

Participants

The participants were recruited among the students at two upper secondary schools in the Olomouc region in the Czech Republic. These students were learning Chinese at their respective schools between the years 2019 and 2021 and their interviews took place at the end of the school year in May 2021.

Altogether, 17 students (aged 16-19) were interviewed. The original intention of the researcher was to divide the students into two sub-groups based on their decision to continue/discontinue learning Chinese, an approach that was used for example by Speiller (1988). However, during the interviews it was discovered that three students supposedly in the ‘discontinue’ group verbally expressed their wish to continue learning once the period of remote schooling (caused by the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic) was finished. Due to the qualitative nature of this study, it was decided not to exclude these students from the analysis but to label them as a separate group (similar in some aspects to the ‘continue’ group).

The students were therefore divided into three sub-groups: Group A consisting of seven students (labelled Student A1-A7) that were still learning Chinese at the time of the interview and expressed their wish to continue learning Chinese in the future; Group B consisting of seven students (labelled Student B1-B7) who had stopped attending their Chinese classes before the time of the interview and decided not to continue learning Chinese in the future; and Group C consisting of three students (labelled Student C1-C3) who had temporarily discontinued learning Chinese due to school closures, but expressed the wish to continue learning in the future.

More details about the students in each group can be seen in Table 1. Students from both elective courses and extracurricular classes were recruited for the study. All but three students had weekly 90-minute classes, the other three students (A6, A7, B5) had one 60-minute class each week. The same three students were taught by a Chinese native speaker, while all the other students were taught by a local Czech teacher.

Table 1. Detailed information about the three groups of respondents.

Group		A	B	C
Current status		continues or plans to continue learning	discontinued learning	temporarily discontinued learning (due to the preference for offline learning)
Number of students (male, female)		7 (2 M, 5 F)	7 (2 M, 5 F)	3 (3 F)
Students who have completed	one semester or less	–	B1, B2, B3, B4, B6, B7	C2
	two semesters	A3, A4	–	–
	more than two semesters	A1, A2, A5, A6, A7	B5	C1, C3
Students who have Chinese as	an elective subject	A1, A2, A3, A4, A5	B1	C1, C2
	an extracurricular activity	A6, A7	B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B7	C3

Procedures and analysis

This study employed semi-structured interviews with individual students concerning their attitudes towards learning Chinese. The BALLI questionnaire and the Chinese Learning and Teaching Questionnaire developed by Yang (2015) served as a basis for creating a list of topics for the interviews: these were (1) learning motivation, (2) learning aptitude, (3) learning difficulty, (4) learning strategies and (5) the role of characters in Chinese language learning.

The interviews were conducted informally , with the intention of gaining the confidence of the respondents and helping them to express their thoughts more freely. The interviews were conducted online due to public health concerns and local COVID-19 restrictions at the time of recording in spring 2021. They were recorded with the Zoom application with the explicit consent of the students. The average interview lasted for approximately 20 minutes.

The recordings were subsequently manually transcribed. Qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2014) was performed to process the data. The analysis followed the process described by Lune and Berg (2017: 184): codes were developed based on the data, main themes were identified, and the students’ answers were categorised based on these themes.

Due to the non-interventional nature of the present study, ethical approval was not required.

Results

Learning motivation

Not all students in Group A (the ‘continuers’) necessarily had any special personal motivation related to China or Chinese culture. Some students only developed such motivation after starting the Chinese class. However, none of the students from Group B (the ‘disontinuers’) expressed any personal interest in China or Chinese culture at all, except for Student B5, who had been attending a Chinese course for a longer period of time, had had the opportunity to visit China and only quit the class due to focusing on a completely different field of study. Overall, we can see a strong link between having or developing a personal interest in Chinese language and/or culture and continuing the Chinese class (see Table 2 for detailed numbers).

Table 2. Students’ personal motivation for choosing the Chinese language course.

Group	A	B	C
Number of students with interest in Chinese (Asian) culture before taking the class	3 (4)	0 (1)	1 (2)
Number of students with interest in Chinese culture after taking the class	6	1	2

Some students speculated about the role of instrumental motivation in the students’ retention rates in secondary Chinese classes. For example, Student C2 stated that if students do not want to go to China, there is no reason for them to learn Chinese. Student A6 developed this idea even further:

China is such a distant country. It isn’t a typical holiday destination, and the culture is completely different … So even just getting there, buying the tickets and stuff, is not that easy, and the visa and everything … So, when you think about what language to learn, you choose either German, because Germany is so easy to visit, or Spanish or Italian, because you can go there to the seaside for holidays.

Group A students mostly reported that their parents did not have any special interest in them learning the language. One of the students said their parents ‘do not have anything against it’, another student’s parents ‘are not particularly excited about it’. On the other hand, parents of the Group B students reportedly showed more support. For example, two students mentioned that their father was the one to request them to choose the subject, but this factor was not sufficient to maintain their interest.

Learning aptitude

Students identified Chinese characters as both their most favourite (ten students) and least favourite (also ten students) part of the Chinese language. The overlap between these two groups was caused by three students in Group A and two students in Group C identifying the characters as both what they liked the most and what they liked the least. The most cited reason for the characters being their least favourite part of Chinese was the simple fact that ‘there are way too many of them to memorise’.

As for personal strengths and weaknesses in learning Chinese, Group A students were mostly able to identify skills they excelled at, while most Group B students typically were not. Two students from Group B believed that learning characters was in fact their main strength. Half of the students across all groups mentioned characters as their main weakness, with seven of these students specifically highlighting character writing. Only one of these students was from Group B. Students from this group mostly identified pronunciation as their main weakness.

Learning difficulty

Two thirds of the students mentioned characters as the most difficult aspect of Chinese. Half of these students specifically mentioned character writing. Only one student (B7) identified the characters as the easiest aspect of Chinese, saying:

I’d say that the easiest thing is … here maybe I contradict myself, but learning the characters. Because that’s something I can learn by myself and then I know how to write them … And when I see them somewhere, I can probably recognize them. I think it’s more difficult to understand the spoken language.

Half of the other Group B students could not think of any ‘easy’ aspect of Chinese, while most students in Group A mentioned grammar.

When asked to compare Chinese and its perceived level of difficulty to other languages they learn at school, some students again mentioned Chinese characters as the factor that presents the greatest challenge and differentiates learning Chinese from learning European languages. Several students said that the load of information that is required to be memorised in the initial stages of learning is too overwhelming, therefore learning progress is rather slow, and students do not see immediate results. Other frequently mentioned factors included the tones, pronunciation in general and the fact that native speakers speak too fast, resulting in difficulties with understanding.

Some students attempted to explain the high dropout rate in secondary classes by thematising the existing prejudice that ‘Chinese is difficult’. According to Student B5, ‘many people say that it’s too difficult, that they simply can’t make it, and that’s why they don’t even try’. Student A1 claimed ‘there isn’t one particularly difficult aspect of Chinese, it’s rather the general stereotype that it’s difficult and impossible to learn for a European’. However, half of the students across all groups were uniform in asserting that early-stage language learning is always difficult, and each language poses specific challenges. According to these students, Chinese is not necessarily more difficult than, for example, English, and the prejudiced attitude concerning its difficulty should be tackled. For example, Student B5 suggested that ‘Chinese should become more widespread, it should become one of the commonly taught foreign languages, so that the prejudice that it’s too hard could disappear … And people would realise it’s worth trying.’ Student B7 addressed the issue of difficulty of Chinese characters by suggesting that ‘the Chinese writing looks complicated, but it’s very specific … typical for Chinese. (…) People shouldn’t get discouraged by the visual aspect of Chinese, instead they should try to immerse themselves into the language and get to know it better.’

Only Student B6 mentioned the difficulty of Chinese language as their reason for leaving the Chinese class. This student did not register for the Chinese class due to their personal choice, but only to accompany a friend. Other students discontinued learning Chinese for reasons not related to the language itself, such as personal preference for offline over online learning, overlap in their timetable and time constraints due to commuting to school.

Learning strategies

As for the learning strategies, no major differences were found between the groups. Most students agreed there was a clear system in character formation, even though they were not able to fully appreciate it due to their limited learning experience. The most frequently used character learning method was hand copying.

As for the number of characters that should be taught each week, students’ answers usually varied from five to ten. Only five students from Group A and one student from Group C claimed they practised characters before their class. Their class preparation time usually did not exceed approximately half an hour.

The role of characters in Chinese language learning

Students across all groups generally expressed a positive attitude towards Chinese characters. Despite often mentioning them as the most challenging part of learning Chinese, they also described them as the factor that makes learning Chinese interesting. While Group A students were already more experienced and therefore also more aware of the challenges connected to learning characters, Group B students had only limited experience and were expressing their fascination with the characters rather than concern about the quantity or difficulty (see Table 3 for the key words describing characters used by students in different groups). Students in Group B appreciated the systematic nature of the stroke order and the way Chinese characters were formed. Several students from all groups also explicitly identified the historical development of characters as one of the highlights in their Chinese lessons.

Table 3. Students’ assessment of the characters as represented in the key words they used:

Group	A	B	C
Positive	relaxing, artistic, interesting, exotic, amusing	artistic, adventurous, interesting, fascinating, fun	interesting, entertaining, fun
Neutral	acceptable		memory-training
Negative	difficult, demanding, hard	arduous	arduous

Even though some students said that learning Chinese without characters would be ‘easier’, all respondents agreed that characters are an indispensable part of the Chinese language and should be taught in the lessons. Student B1 suggested that it might be possible to study Chinese without characters at the very beginning, but it would become an obstacle in the long term. Students A6, C2 and C3 specifically mentioned that without learning the characters, they would not be able to understand anything when going to China. More than half of the students in Group B said that they were expecting to learn Chinese characters when joining the course. For example, Student B6 stated: ‘I wanted to learn mainly the characters, I found them interesting … so I expected to see them in the course.’

All the students interviewed in our research agreed that the lessons should cover all aspects of the language, including the reading and writing. Students from Group A mostly suggested that the lesson time should be divided into equal parts and one quarter to one third of the time should be dedicated to learning Chinese characters. Students from Groups B and C frequently suggested allocating even more time for learning characters. Most of these students suggested that up to one half of the total teaching time should be dedicated to learning characters, while only one student preferred listening and speaking over reading and writing. Some students favoured character reading, whereas others attached more importance to writing. While Student C2 said that ‘we should dedicate more time to the more important things, which is the ability to recognise the characters … read the new characters … but writing them is not so important’, Student B2 concluded that ‘more time should be dedicated to writing characters than, for example, speaking, because writing is something that has to be learned properly from the very beginning, the stroke order and so on … (…) [I think] writing is the most important.’

Discussion

Characters represented the most frequently appearing element in students’ answers throughout the interviews, with both positive and negative connotations. Thinking about the reasons why people quit attending the Chinese course, our respondents often speculated on the number of characters that might overwhelm them and on the heavy workload linked to learning Chinese. It is possible that these suppositions were influenced by the general prejudice present around them that Chinese is too difficult and that Chinese characters are impossible to learn. However, the students themselves were not nearly as sceptical. Many remarked that this prejudice ‘should be overcome’. Most students also claimed that Chinese was not significantly more difficult than the other languages they studied at school, such as English or Spanish. This view might seem somewhat naive – it could be argued that students’ knowledge of Chinese at this stage was too superficial to be able to make such judgements. Nevertheless, if our goal is to promote Chinese language teaching at secondary schools, such views might be helpful, and it is in our interest not to suppress them.

In our study, only one student quit learning Chinese due to its perceived difficulty. All the other students quit their Chinese class for reasons not related to the Chinese language itself. This finding partly contradicts the observations made by Ping (2009). However, Ping also noted that in some cases a lack of instrumental motivation influenced students’ decision to discontinue learning Chinese. In most cases of unsuccessful students in our study, a lack of personal motivation could be observed – without sufficient internal motivation, the students would leave the Chinese course when encountering obstacles such as time constraints or the transformation of classes into an online form. Similar conclusions related to learning other languages than Chinese were proposed by Horwitz (1988) and the importance of motivation in teenage students of Chinese was highlighted by Cáceres-Lorenzo (2015).

Some scholars have suggested that characters are a major factor that led students to quit learning Chinese. However, in our study the students who quit learning Chinese mostly expressed a positive attitude towards learning characters and testified that they had expected to learn them when registering for the class. The students called characters ‘interesting’, ‘fascinating’ or ‘fun’, even though at the same time they were also ‘demanding’, ‘arduous’ and ‘hard’. The students who wanted to continue learning the language expressed a more ambiguous attitude towards Chinese characters, not dissimilar to a ‘love-hate relationship’.

The expressed interest in learning characters across all groups in this study is in accordance with the findings of other researchers covering different education levels (Knell and West 2017; Li 2013). Only one student in our study group reported that they could imagine studying Chinese without the characters, since their primary concern was to learn how to speak the language. A handful of other students admitted that studying Chinese without the characters would be easier. However, as one person noted, ‘it would not be the same language’. As we can see in the Czech expression ‘scattered tea leaves’, characters play an essential role in the way Czech people think about the Chinese language and culture and learning how to read and write them is therefore mostly considered an indispensable part of learning the language.

A recurring theme across most of the interviews was the students’ instrumental motivation for learning characters – without knowing them, they felt they would get lost when travelling to China. Apparently, secondary school students judge the usefulness of the languages they learn at school mainly from the perspective of travelling. As one of them pointed out, students see the immediate benefit in learning the languages of the countries where they can easily go on holidays but going to China is probably quite difficult to imagine for teenagers. The lack of any prospects of using Chinese in the near future might play a decisive role in whether to continue attending the class.

Another aspect that needs to be considered are the students‘ attitudes towards different language skills. As pointed out by Lightbrown and Spada (2013: 85), teenage students tend to be very self-conscious. Students may, for example, feel embarrassed when attempting to speak a foreign language in front of their classmates. In our research, Chinese pronunciation was one of the two most frequently mentioned aspects of Chinese that students felt they did not excel at. Communicative language teaching has dominated foreign language teaching in the past decades, but there may be students who prefer more conventional learning approaches. As noted by Horwitz (1999), certain languages might attract students who favour other language teaching methods, such as the grammar-translation method. It might be assumed that Chinese language also attracts rather introverted students, who would feel less intimidated when practising their reading or writing skills during the class rather than speaking. Writing characters during the class might help students relax and enjoy their class without the fear of feeling embarrassed in front of their classmates when attempting to pronounce unfamiliar sounds of Chinese syllables and tones. In addition, individual writing tasks are very common in other subjects in Czech schools, and students, used to teacher-led classes without the need for their own active participation, might expect this approach in their Chinese classes as well.

The enthusiastic approach towards character learning adopted by secondary school students might also be related to the number of characters they are expected to learn. In the Czech Republic, secondary Chinese classes are usually offered on a once-a-week basis. Students at this level spend limited time on home preparation for the classes, as observed by Knell and West (2017) and in the present study. The learning pace is therefore dependent on what they learn during the class, which might be the reason why students do not perceive the characters as such a burden. What they expect from their lessons is to receive general knowledge about the Chinese language and to learn ‘real Chinese’.

The main challenge about learning characters is their active handwriting from memory (Jen and Xu 2000; Ye 2011). This has been identified as the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese by the students in our study as well. However, there was no difference between successful and unsuccessful students of Chinese, both groups felt they faced the same difficulties. In fact, students in Group A perceived writing characters as more difficult than those in Group B. We might assume that Group B students quit learning Chinese too early to realise the full extent of the task they were facing.

Based on the above-mentioned arguments, we might conclude that handwriting of characters does not discourage students from learning Chinese and therefore should not be abandoned in the classes completely. One possible approach mentioned by the authors of several previous studies (Jiang 2007; Ye 2011) might be that students learn to handwrite only some of the characters learned in class, but in Ye’s study students supported this approach much less than the teachers. Another possibility, which might be more suitable for the Chinese classes at the secondary level, is to handwrite all characters but not to force the students to handwrite them from memory, as testing students on handwriting from memory might easily lead to frustration and perceiving Chinese as too difficult.

Presenting Chinese as an accessible language, which is at the same time interesting and entertaining, is potentially the greatest challenge about teaching Chinese at the secondary school level. The questions that need to be addressed are not only whether to teach characters or not, or when to start teaching them, but also how to motivate students to continue with their studies. According to the above-mentioned findings, neither leaving Chinese characters out of the curriculum completely nor teaching them with a delay would be a good solution for a course that seldom lasts for more than only one or two years. Students want and expect to learn characters in their class and with Chinese mostly having the status of an extracurricular activity or elective subject, it is necessary to engage the participants from the very beginning, or risking high dropout rates instead.

Study limitations

There are two main limitations to this research. Firstly, the sample size allows only a limited insight into the research questions. Group C was identified only during the research process, since the three students belonging to this group could not be categorised as either Group A or Group B. Most of the Group B students had stopped learning Chinese more than one year before the time of the interview and their answers might have been affected by that. A comparative research among student populations in different countries might help to confirm whether the findings of the present research are country-specific or even study group-specific, or whether they are applicable to the secondary school learning environment in general.

Secondly, the limited choice of potential respondents was also influenced by the school closures due to COVID-19 pandemic, during which most extracurricular classes were completely cancelled. The resulting sample of respondents consisted of students with different types of learning history. Some students only learned Chinese offline, some only online and some of them in both ways. This might have directly influenced the students’ learning experience and their attitudes towards learning Chinese characters.

Conclusion

The current study examined the role Chinese characters play in the high dropout rate among the students in Chinese courses in secondary education in the Czech Republic. The study discovered that the difficulty of the Chinese characters or the Chinese language in general do not have any major influence on the students’ decision to continue or discontinue attending their Chinese class. The most significant difference between the successful and unsuccessful students of Chinese was observed in their motivation for taking the class. In the case of the successful students, personal motivation was either present before or emerged in the process of taking the course, while the unsuccessful students did not express any strong personal reasons for studying the language.

Teenage students mostly associated language knowledge with travelling, perceiving the characters as an indispensable tool for navigating the Chinese-speaking environment. Chinese characters were also identified as the most attractive aspect of learning Chinese for students in this age group. Handwriting practice seems to be more entertaining than burdensome for the students, as long as the number of characters they learn remains limited and does not require excessive self-study. Putting greater emphasis on learning characters during the lessons without requesting the students to handwrite them from memory could potentially make Chinese more interesting and accessible for the students in secondary education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted under project no. TL02000557 ‘Chinese at grammar schools and high/secondary schools’ which was co-financed with the state support of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR) within the ÉTA Programme.