Foreign Language Teaching during COVID-19: Sri Lankan Students’ Perceptions of Learning Chinese Characters through Online Teaching

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on worldwide economies, public health, social well-being, and in particular education. Because of the rapid spread of the virus, educational facilities from the basic to the tertiary level have been closed since the beginning of As a result, most universities and academic institutions have moved to online Learning Management Systems (LMS). Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) was implemented at the University of Kelaniya to upload instructional materials and conduct online lectures. Because there are more than 200 students enrolled in the degree program, teaching Chinese language characters to beginner-level first-year undergraduates has been a difficult task. When compared to traditional Chinese character teaching methods, the new approach made it more difficult for teachers to teach because there was no face-to-face interaction with the students which hindered the opportunity for real-time group and one-on-one classroom feedback. Teaching Chinese characters in face-to-face sessions involves the four abilities of language learning – listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As a result, CAL-based online Chinese character teaching has run into several stumbling blocks, with students reporting difficulty understanding numerous meanings, pronunciations, and stroke patterns. Therefore, this study aimed to look into Sri Lankan students’ opinions of learning Chinese characters online to come up with innovative teaching methods to address the difficulties. The research sample comprised 60 first-year undergraduates enrolled in the University of Kelaniya’s Department of Modern Languages Bachelor of Arts (B.A) General Degree program. A questionnaire was used to obtain the information. The findings of the research encountered that identifying the correct usage of stroke patterns was the most difficult task of learning Chinese characters online. Apart from that, some students struggled to accurately pronounce the characters’ sounds and distinguish between similar character meanings. Furthermore, the students were demotivated by the repeat of errors made while writing Chinese characters, as the teacher was not given the opportunity to rectify each student’s errors individually. Through the research findings, it can be suggested that novel teaching approaches suitable for online teaching of Chinese characters should be integrated into the B. A General Degree first-year course modules to make the learning of Chinese characters an enjoyable and stress-free experience.