Abstract
An elementary school student in Taiwan is expected to learn 2500~2900 different Chinese characters from Chinese textbooks. The purpose of the present research is to evaluate the appropriateness of the arrangement of character sequences in textbooks. One hundred and fifty one experienced elementary school teachers of Chinese descent participated in Study 1. They were asked to evaluate the relative importance of 9 properties of Chinese characters, including character usage in writing, features of character orthography, and complexity of character phonology and semantics, when selecting characters to teach. The participants indicated that properties such as ＂frequency of use in children's books＂ and ＂number of words included as morpheme＂ are important and should be considered in every grade. They also found that, ＂number of character strokes＂ is important for grade 1 and 2, and ＂frequency of use in children's own writing＂ should be considered in grade 5 and 6. Based on the findings of Study 1, Study 2 evaluated how the potential characters to be learned were arranged in Chinese textbooks published by three publishers. The results showed that although the characters in the textbooks published by the same publisher were selected and arranged in accordance with the sequence indicated by character properties, there was much variation regarding the selection and learning sequence arrangement of the characters among the publishers. For example, between two publishers, there could be 20~30% difference on the characters to be learned included in the textbooks. All together, the potential characters to be learned in about 15% of the articles were misplaced in the teaching sequence. Moreover, a database containing about 5900 different characters and their properties has been built, and a computer program utilizing the database to analyze the characters in an article has also been designed. The database and program will be available on the internet.