Improving Literacy Skills in Mandarin Language Among Non-Native Speakers’ Students at the Beginner Level Using the Grouping-Arranging-Touch Up (GAT) Method and Word Sequence Diagram (WSD)

Mandarin Language possesses differences in sentence structure as compared to English Language and Malay Language, and this causes non-native speakers’ students to have a hard time arranging the sentences in Mandarin Language correctly. To solve this problem, the teaching staff must seek out methods to allow the students to excel in arranging the sentence structure without consuming large amounts of time and in learning grammar in Mandarin. Therefore, one of the methods is the Grouping-Arranging-Touch Up (GAT) Method and the Word Sequence Diagram (WSD). By using these methods, students can excel in the sentence structure by just grouping the related words or phrases and listing them according to the category, and then some adjustment is made after that for the sentence structure for GAT or converting those phrases into four figures as utilized in WSD, as mentioned by Cheun, Ho, and Hoe (2008). The research was done by assessing students’ performance in arranging sentence structure before and after learning the methods of GAT and WSD, and the students’ performance increased after they had been taught the GAT and WSD methods.