Mandarin as the chosen foreign language course among learners of foreign languages : a case study

• Main Authors: See Soo Yin, Ching Thing Ho
• Format: Non-Indexed Article
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://discol.umk.edu.my/id/eprint/7904/; http://www.researchersworld.com/vol4/issue3/vol4_issue3_2/Paper_08.pdf

Mandarin language course is offered to foreign language students either as a compulsory elective or free elective course at university level. However, students’ performance in this course still leaves a lot to be desired as most of them are still unable to communicate well in the language upon completion of the course. Thus, this study intends to identify the perceptions of students enrolling in the course in order to better understand the matter. This quantitative field research employs questionaires and purposive sampling technique as the methods of collecting data. The sampling involves 74 students from UMK who have enrolled in level 2 Mandarin course. The findings show there are important factors attribute to students preference for Mandarin course. The findings demonstrate that the number of students who obtained A Grade in the test at Level 1 was higher than those who obtained lower grades and they found that the test’s level of difficulty was rather moderate. Moreover, the majority of the respondents found that learning the Chinese characters was difficult as compared to learning pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin. Therefore, this study suggests that teachers should opt for a variety of teaching aids in order to draw students’ interest in the course.