This paper attempted to shed light on the ways to facilitate the Elementary School students` acquisition of Chinese characters through analyzing the meaning of each character. Chinese characters account for over 70 percent of Korean vocabulary and their history of assimilation is so long that the speech public tend to accept the borrowed words as pure Korean. It is this reality that makes us unable to rule out the Chinese characters in teaching the vocabulary at Elementary Schools. Nevertheless, the teachers confine themselves to giving the etymological explanation or teaching the radicals and strokes, making use of the optional hours. In Chinese, every word is a free morpheme so the language is very productive. Therefore, the author emphasized the goal of getting students to acquire as many words as possible through the understanding of the semantic aspects of Chinese words as well as getting them to write the acquired words. The method proposed is helping students build up word power through the activity of finding out the words that have the same semantic element after they are taught the common characters found in the reading texts for the first semester of Fifth grade. The students are then required to write the Chinese words whose meanings are already known. At the closure of the lesson, they are told a story on some old wise phraseology to help them grow in personality. This semantically oriented instruction of teaching Chinese characters has proved to be very helpful for the students` vocabulary build-up because they learn how to analyze the compounds into separate morphemes which they have already acquired. However, since the lessons for introducing the Chinese characters are not of the regular curriculum, teaching them in regular Korean classes is prohibited, but the optional hours are usually spent for other activities. Another problem is that a complete learning cannot be achieved because only reading the Chinese characters is focused on, excluding the writing exercises. Still another problem is that there are often big individual gaps found among the students the amount of whose prior exposure to Chinese characters varies. So individualized teaching for the retarded is required in some cases, but above all things teaching Chinese characters should be included in the regular curriculum. A desirable literacy program should be based upon a sound analysis of our everyday life in using language in that the children`s both maximal and correct use of our language is the basis for teaching Chinese characters at Elementary Schools. In this respect, the teaching of Chinese characters is nothing less than an effort to use our language optimally and systematically. Finding out an appropriate method of teaching Chinese characters to the second generations who will prevail in the 21st century appears to be an immediate necessity.

• 金美慶(부산 학장초등학교) | Kim Mi-gyeong