THE Education Department has fallen short on its recommendations for the primary school Chinese language programme, according to research done by Yew Chung Education Foundation.
The department set guidelines for Chinese language teachers to help primary pupils to acquire a vocabulary of 2,600 Chinese characters in stages through their six years in school.
However, many of those characters are found to be obsolete and at least one out of the 10 sets of Chinese textbooks recommended by the department teaches only 1,700 Chinese characters.
Dr Lui Tsz-tak, Chinese curriculum development officer of the foundation, discovered the discrepancy in Education Department standard during a random examination of seven out of the 10 sets of books recommended by the department.
'It shows that the department isn't truly serious about how many characters students are actually learning,' Dr Lui said.
He said language research conducted in China demonstrated that 'students knowing less than 2,000 characters can hardly read an article'.
Dr Lui said the deteriorating standard among primary pupils was due to their limited vocabulary.