As the era of Covid-19 provoked the demand for online learning environments, research on the use of IT technologies in the teaching of Chinese is also drawing attention. This paper presents an overview of studies on mobile applications for learning Chinese in Korea, China, and the U.S.. This study aims to identify the current status of research on mobile applications for learning Chinese in Korea, and suggests directions for further research. In the review, a total of 135 studies were closely examined based on the year of publication, the subject, the method, and the research topic. After this, the features and overall flow of research in each country was identified. The necessity of revitalizing related research in Korea was highlighted. To this end, this study recommends actively conducting research, specifying the characteristics of the research subject, and extending the general process in studies of mobile applications for learning Chinese. This study expects Chinese education research on using various technologies to be further discussed.

With the development of technology, innovations are taking place in the education field, with smart device-based Chinese educational applications drawing attention. This study examines the current status of Chinese educational applications in Korea, China, and the U.S., and explores possible directions to design effective applications for Korean young learners. A total of 179 applications from three countries were investigated and classified based on educational application criteria. Among them, the top five applications were selected from each country using ratings and reviews. Each application was then evaluated and analyzed according to the evaluation criteria. The results demonstrated that applications from the U.S. were the highest scoring overall and highest in terms of content, with applications from China highest in terms of function. The result also presented three common problems, which are limited types of applications, the absence of camera function utilization, and the lack of learning activities to experience Chinese culture. This study recommends further discussions on Chinese educational applications with the broadened scope of application types and target learners.

In the current elementary Chinese education, the implementation of the perspective of multi-cultural education has great significance since it can positively bring the multi-cultural characteristics of Korean society into class and can develop students’ competence for cosmopolitans living in the age of multi-culturalism. Against this backdrop, this study aims to seek the directions of the development of elementary Chinese textbooks needed for the integrated operation of elementary Chinese education and multi-cultural education. As a baseline study for the ultimate goal, elementary Chinese textbooks currently used at schools were analyzed for evaluation. Then, the results of the analysis were used to propose the directions of the development of textbooks on multi-cultural education in the following areas: the purpose of the textbooks, the presentation of contents, and learning activities. It is expected that, from this study, there will be active discussions on Chinese education, which will not only develop students’ linguistic competence of Chinese but also cultivate the multi-cultural competence at the elementary school in the future.