Curriculum design in teaching Chinese characters to American students: when and what?

Abstract Chinese characters have been the most challenging aspect of the language to American learners. Whether or not and how to teach Chinese characters to beginner learners have been debated since the 1930s. Nowadays, the ubiquitous presence of computers and tablets has complicated how Chinese characters should be integrated in the curriculum. It is important to systematically review what scholars have proposed regarding curriculum design for teaching characters in the United States. In this systematic review study, an exhaustive search through the past nine decades of scholarship on teaching Chinese characters identified 16 peer-reviewed journal articles published since 1937 that focused on teaching Chinese characters at the level of course design and overall curriculum design for a Chinese program. Two themes regarding character teaching – when and what to teach – were identified. Each theme was analyzed in detail, and a tentative model was proposed based on that analysis.