Characters and words are basic elements in Mandarin textbooks. The number of characters and words has been set in the Curriculum Guidelines of the 12-Year Basic Education. However, there is no clear principle for which or how many characters and words specified. On the basis of character frequency and word frequency in corpus, subproject 2 adopts the methods of expert consultation and text analysis to not only analyze the characters and words in Mandarin textbooks as well as newspaper and books for outside reading but also probe into scientific indicators and theoretical basis of characters and words in each learning stage. The contribution of this subproject is to develop the contents for classification of characters and words frequently used by K-12 students in the area of Chinese Language. The findings will be used as the reference to curriculum development, teaching materials compilation, testing and assessment, and teaching.
