Chinese character teaching stands in a very important status in the language teaching. It’s of vital importance to study Chinese characters well for students who want to improve their Chinese language proficiency. More and more American colleges and universities have begun to offer Chinese courses, but there are some problems at the same time. First of all, the Chinese courses in American universities are basically integrated courses. There is no special Chinese character class, and the time for teachers to teach Chinese characters is limited. Secondly, some teachers do not pay attention to the teaching of Chinese characters, but only focus on listening, speaking and speaking training. Students have got on idea when facing Chinese characters with many strokes and complex structures at the beginning stage. Because of the above situation, this article takes the students from the Chinese classes in the 2019 and 2020 academic years of Wesleyan University in the United States as the research object to carry out research.

The first chapter of this research is the introduction of the thesis, which introduces the origin of the topic, the research significance, and the related theories and research summary of Chinese character teaching for non-native learners. The second part is a basic introduction to the elementary Chinese character course at Wesleyan University, including the background of the students and the Chinese character textbooks used by two teachers. The third part is the research of teachers’ teaching methods. Through classroom observation, getting detailed information about the teaching plan, ideology and methods used by two teachers. The fourth part introduces the design and results of the questionnaire survey. It analyzes the Chinese character learning situation of the two classes from the perspectives of students' learning attitude, learning input, and learning methods. The fifth part analyzes the students’ Chinese character errors, including incorrect characters and characters which are written into a similar one . The incorrect characters are analyzed from both strokes and components, each of which has three kinds. There is also a type of multiple errors. Then this chapter analyzes and summarizes the characters which are written into a similar one from the perspective of the shape and sound of the character. The sixth part analyzes the influencing factors of the learning errors, and gives suggestions for the teaching of Chinese characters in the elementary stage. The suggestions includes the formulation of a reasonable teaching plan, specific classroom teaching from the perspective of strokes and components, and after-school tutoring. The conclusion part summarizes the full text, and finds out the shortcomings of this research.