Mandarin as the chosen foreign language course among learners of foreign languages : a case study

Mandarin language course is offered to foreign language students either as a compulsory elective
or free elective course at university level. However, students’ performance in this course still
leaves a lot to be desired as most of them are still unable to communicate well in the language
upon completion of the course. Thus, this study intends to identify the perceptions of students
enrolling in the course in order to better understand the matter. This quantitative field research
employs questionaires and purposive sampling technique as the methods of collecting data. The
sampling involves 74 students from UMK who have enrolled in level 2 Mandarin course. The
findings show there are important factors attribute to students preference for Mandarin course.
The findings demonstrate that the number of students who obtained A Grade in the test at Level 1
was higher than those who obtained lower grades and they found that the test’s level of difficulty
was rather moderate. Moreover, the majority of the respondents found that learning the Chinese
characters was difficult as compared to learning pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin. Therefore, this
study suggests that teachers should opt for a variety of teaching aids in order to draw students’
interest in the course.