基于《国际中文教育中文水平等级标准》IBDP中文B普通课程汉字表编制研究

Abstract

This study addresses the practical issue of the absence of a unified Chinese character list for the IBDP Chinese B Standard Level course (hereafter “the Standard Course”) and explores a feasible approach to constructing a course-specific character list based on the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (hereafter “the Standards”).

This study begins by using global examination papers for the Standard Course from 2007 to 2013 as the corpus, a dataset comprising 104,196 characters was compiled. From this corpus, 2,129 Chinese characters were extracted and systematically compared with those in the Standards. The results show that 2,001 characters are shared between the two, accounting for 94% of the total characters in the examination papers. This indicates that the Standards demonstrate a high degree of coverage and compatibility with international curricula. Further analysis reveals that the shared characters exhibit a “pyramidal” distribution across proficiency levels in the Standards, decreasing from elementary to intermediate and then to advanced levels. This reflects both the internal consistency and divergence among character frequency, proficiency levels, and curriculum assessment requirements. Meanwhile, characters unique to the Standard Course are largely context-dependent, including personal and place names, low-frequency characters, and culturally loaded characters. In contrast, characters unique to the Standards are concentrated at higher levels, reflecting greater abstraction, specialization, and features of written language.

Based on these comparative findings, this study proposes a tiered classification system of “core characters – secondary core characters – reference characters.” The shared characters form the core character list; selected course-specific characters, together with characters unique to Levels 1–4 of the Standards, constitute the secondary core list; and characters unique to Levels 5–6 of the Standards serve as an extended reference set. This system ensures pedagogical operability while achieving systematic alignment between curriculum objectives and the Standards. It provides a structured scaffold for Chinese character learning in the Standard Course, fills the gap in applying the Standards to specific international Chinese curricula, and offers a practical model for the international implementation of the Standards.