This paper addresses and discusses some major issues in Chinese characters education in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (CSL).  Chinese characters teaching in CSL involves training skills such as character recognition & production, as well as reading & writing skills.  A very simple and common question from amateur is that how many characters should be taught at different levels and which set of characters should be taught at different level.  However, some important literatures in the CSL field in recent years (Jin, 2006; Zhao, 2009) advocate pragmatic views and emphasize that correctness of language forms can only solve the basic problems of “what”, but “when the language is used”, “to whom the language is used” and “in what situation the language is used”, are important in determining the successfulness of communication.  Following the pragmatic views of language teaching and learning, teacher incorporating one keyword in teaching CSL nowadays is “pragmatic based”.  Learners and teachers concern the actual targeted learning outcomes which are not just how many characters are learnt, but what the learners can do.  In order to achieve the outcomes, there are several issues teachers and curriculum planner to address and to discuss.  The skills involved include: 1. Characters collocations 2. Pragmatic use of language 3. Law of diminishing return in learning (Hsueh, 2005; Mark & Lu, 2005) This paper would use cases in tertiary education teaching CSL in Hong Kong to discuss the issues. 

Most learners in Chinese Characters and Reading classes are satisfied with progress from novice level to intermediate level. However, frustration may start in advanced level because of the diminishing marginal return phenomenon in learning Chinese characters and scripts. (Hsueh 2005, Lau 2009, Mark & Lu 2005). The “common sense” to all teachers teaching Chinese reading classes is to give more readings. By observation the increase in the quantity of reading does not automatically relate to learners’ learning outcome. Other factors like authenticity of the reading and systemic design of the tasks are affecting the learning outcomes of the learners. A needs analysis has been done (Lee 2000) and the data confirms that students are looking for authentic or adopted materials with systematic task-design for them to improve their reading skills and the materials are expected to be used in class or in a self-access mode. As a result, teachers teaching Chinese learners’ in advanced reading classes should try to use newspaper articles and other authentic materials to teach Chinese reading. This paper discusses a Reading Materials Database (RMD) project. In this project, about 1000 authentic articles are collected and categorized into various topics and levels. Learners can use the systematically organized database as a self-access database and search for topics that they need to read for specific reading and presentation projects. Teachers can use it as a database for searching materials for teaching. Materials developers can also use the database to analyze frequency of certain vocabulary items. The database is also useful for academic research purposes, such as word frequency analysis, corpus linguistics, and dictionary research.