Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association

2021

This study specifically addresses the issues of teaching Chinese character writing. As the students who are not native to Chinese encounter much difficulty in acquiring the writing system for reading and writing, there is an urgent need to review and improve the teaching methods applied at CFL institutions to better help the students to overcome the difficulty. Also, it is evident from research(Luria,1973) that there is a link between reading comprehension of a language and visual intelligence, hence it is imperative to clarify this aspect in Chinese language and derive suggestive measures for its application for the improvement of teaching Chinese characters. When the same methods of teaching are applied to the students having different levels of intelligences, it makes the learning process easy for some students and hard for others. There is an urgent need of revision of methods used for teaching Chinese characters as it doesn’t address the ability of all the students.

The logographic nature of the Chinese writing system creates a huge hurdle for Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners. Existing literature (e.g., Shen, 2010; Taft & Chung, 1999) suggests that radical knowledge facilitates character learning. In this project, we selected 48 compound characters in eight radical groups and examined how grouping characters based on their radicals affected the form, sound, and meaning representations of characters and radical knowledge development. We found that for beginning learners, learning radical-sharing characters in groups consistently led to better recall and better radical generalization than learning in distribution. For intermediate level learners, the grouping factor did not lead to significant differences, while participants in both conditions made improvement in radical perception and radical semantic awareness generalization. Weconcluded that there is a benefit to presenting learners with recurring radicals in compound characters in groups in character learning and in the autonomous generalization of radical knowledge. We also noted the differences between beginning and intermediate learners in their character perception and learning, and put forward implications for CFL pedagogy.

Cognition, 2018

According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), phonological decoding is fundamental to acquiring orthographic representations of novel written words. However, phonological decoding is not straightforward in non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese, where words are presented as characters. Here, we present the first study investigating the role of phonological decoding in orthographic learning in Chinese. We examined two possible types of phonological decoding: the use of phonetic radicals, an internal phonological aid, and the use of Zhuyin, an external phonological coding system. Seventy-three Grade 2 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of twelve novel compound characters over four days. They were then exposed to the written characters in short stories, and were assessed on their reading accuracy and on their subsequent orthographic learning via orthographic choice and spelling tasks. The novel characters were assigned three different types of pronunciation in relation to its phonetic radical-(1) a pronunciation that is identical to the phonetic radical in isolation; (2) a common alternative pronunciation associated with the phonetic radical when it appears in other characters; and (3) a pronunciation that is unrelated to the phonetic radical. The presence of Zhuyin was also manipulated. The children read the novel characters more accurately when phonological cues from the phonetic radicals were available and in the presence of Zhuyin. However, only the phonetic radicals facilitated orthographic learning. The findings provide the first empirical evidence of orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese, and reveal how phonological decoding functions to support learning in non-alphabetic writing systems.

Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, 2020

From the perspective of graphological structure, this article examines Vietnamese methods of teaching and learning Chinese characters by analyzing their phonetic and semantic elements. The selected sample for the survey is taken from characters collected from Thiều Chửu’s Dictionary of Chinese Script with Sino-Vietnamese Reading—the most useful dictionary in Vietnam in nearly 100 years. The resulting statistics reveal that, out of the 14,950 characters in this dictionary, there are 931 phonetic elements in which 455 are strong ones, producing 10–20 phono-semantic characters. This article argues that analyzing the relationship between the characters and their phonetic elements read in Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation is a good method for Vietnamese people to teach and learn Chinese characters. The method of learning Chinese characters has been applied in teaching Chinese characters for more than 1000 monks and nuns at the Vietnam Buddhist Academy in Hanoi. The experimental results show ...

Previous studies suggest that writing helps reading development in Chinese in both first and second language settings by enabling higher‐quality orthographic representation of the characters. This study investigated the comparative effectiveness of reading, animation, and writing in developing foreign language learners’ orthographic knowledge of Chinese and found that, for learners with existing orthographic knowledge, the three learning conditions facilitated character learning in different ways: Writing and animation both led to better form recognition, while reading produced superior meaning and sound recalls. In addition, the effect of animation in meaning recall was also better than writing. In developing the skill of reproducing characters from memory, writing was superior. Implications for the teaching and learning of Chinese characters are offered.

It is widely recognized that students in beginning-level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) courses find learning characters to be one of the most difficult aspects of learning Chinese. Because the issues involved in character instruction are rather complex and controversial, character instruction in CFL has long been a challenge faced by both instructors and students. Many teachers consider the teaching of characters as an obstacle or stumbling block to learning, rather than as an essential step toward achieving literacy that should be integrated into the core of the Chinese curriculum. In this paper, I propose a new approach to character instruction in the context of literacy development. To prove that character instruction should be included as one of the core components in the beginning Chinese curriculum, I will discuss these three points: (1) the role of character instruction in CFL language acquisition, second, (2) guiding principles for teaching characters successfully, and...

Journal of the European Second Language Association, 2023

This study explored whether beginner-level learners use radicals to learn written Chinese characters in making form-meaning paired-associate mappings, one of the key components in written character acquisition and word learning . Eyegaze patterns during new word-learning was measured to indicate visual focus, along with visual working memory (VWM) capacity, hitherto unexamined at beginner-level for Chinese . The experiment compared ease of recall across three groups of characters with different semantic radicals (nominal and verbal) and different visual salience. Greater visual salience rather than semantic class was predicted to foster ease of recall . Thirty-five adult Anglophone ab-initio learners of Chinese took part, recruited after five weeks at a language institute in China. Participants completed a computerbased self-paced character learning test and a VWM shape recall test. They then took a randomized character recall test; eyegaze patterns measured fixations on target radical areas during learning and testing phases. During testing, nominal recall was significantly the fastest and most accurate of the three types (p < .001). There were no significant correlations for accuracy of recall with VWM or eyegaze patterns. These findings, although tentative, suggest that some linguistic element of noun-learning comes "for free " (e.g., Gentner, 1982) even at beginner-level level. The study has timely implications for theoretical and pedagogical understanding of Chinese word learning processes, given the rapidly expanding area of Mandarin Chinese language learning in both taught and self-study app-based contexts.

A study was carried out to determine whether knowledge of the internal radical structure of a Chinese character helps a naive learner to memorize that character. Four groups of Australian subjects who knew nothing about Chinese were asked to learn24 character/meaning pairs (e.g., ER-CHBW). Each character was composed of two radicals taken from a set of 16. Every subject was presented with the set of character-meaning pairs three times and then were given each character alone and asked to recall the meaning associated with it. Before seeing any characters, one group (Radicals Before) told about radicals and had 15 minutes to learn the set of 16 radicals thoroughly. Another (Radicals Early) was told about radicals at the first presentation of the stimuli, but were simply asked, as each character was presented, to point out on a chart its component radicals. A third group (Radicals Late) didthe same thing, but at the third presentation of the stimuli; while a final group (No Radicak) were told nothing about radicals at all. It was found that memory for the character-meaning pairings was best for the Radicals Early group, suggesting that it is important to highlight the radicals when a character is first presented to the learner.

The goal of this study is to investigate whether different types of structures and lexical tones of Chinese characters cause different processing fluency. In Experiment 1, partici-pants' explicit affective assessments of Chinese characters with different structures, frequencies , and lexical tones were analyzed. Results indicated that participants showed explicit preferences and dispreferences to different structures and lexical tones. In Experiment 2, participants' implicit responses to different structures and lexical tones were investigated using a metaphor experimental paradigm. Results were consistent with the major findings of Experiment 1. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants' recognition of words of different structures and lexical tones were analyzed. Results revealed that participants had a better memory for Surround structure characters when stimuli were visually presented and for Tone 3 when stimuli were auditorily presented. Finally, the significance and implications of this study are discussed.

Instructional Science, 2013

The variation theory of Ference Marton and his collaborators has widely been used as a framework for explaining what can possibly be learned in a particular classroom and what cannot. This paper reports on an experiment that put this theory to test in the context of students' learning of the orthographic structures of Chinese characters. The experiment was carried out in the classrooms of two primary schools in Hong Kong. In each of the schools, two classes of students were taught differently, as informed by the theory, about the significance of the location of a component in the orthographic structure of a character in relation to whether the component provided a clue to the meaning of the character (called the part-part relations). The results of the experiment are consistent with the prediction of the theory that those students who were given the possibility to experience variation in the locations of components in the orthographic structures significantly outperformed those who were not. The results of the experiment demonstrate the power of the theory in guiding the design of teaching that affords students' learning to happen.

This study investigates what beginning learners of Chinese perceive as helpful in learning to recognize characters. Thirteen English-speaking participants in a beginning Chinese class answered journal questions and completed a survey over one semester at a large Midwestern university. Findings suggest that participants perceived the usefulness of different ways of learning: (a) Studying characters individually strongly facilitated the learning of Chinese orthography and also helped with meaning and pronunciation; (b) using characters in context strongly supported the learning of meaning and pronunciation; (c) practicing characters through cooperative learning created a good learning environment, provided support and facilitated meaningful interaction for learners. Participants thought it was helpful to focus on individual characters for orthography and use characters in context for meaning.

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2015

The present research paper critically examines use of pinyin as a substitute of characters by Zimbabwean students during acquisition of Chinese language. A questionnaire survey and character recognition survey was done and it was discovered that the use of pinyin as a substitute for Chinese characters negatively affects the acquisition of more complex characters. It was concluded that since each Chinese character is an individual morpheme that carries meaning, therefore dependence on Chinese pinyin negatively affects vocabulary acquisition. The paper recommends that use of pinyin in teaching Chinese language should be limited to the first few weeks, because pinyin was developed to help students acquire the phonetic system of Chinese language rather than the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. The paper suggests that there is need to explore more ways of balancing the teaching of pinyin and characters in a way that will motivate learners to like Chinese language.

Proceedings of the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference 2005, 2005

1 Usefulness of phonetic symbols in language teaching and learning

Educational Psychology, 2002

Previous research has shown that the learning of second language words in the simultaneous presence of pictures or rst language translation equivalents interferes with their acquisition. The purpose of this study was to investigate variables associated with the learning of Chinese characters as second language stimuli (L2). Acquisition for both naming of English translations and pronunciations was shown to proceed more rapidly under conditions in which each character was presented 5 s prior to its pinyin and English word equivalent, in contrast to simultaneous presentation conditions. These data were interpreted in terms of (a) interference, which can occur when students attend to multiple input simultaneously, and (b) the bene cial effects of attending to L2 stimuli prior to their associations in language learning contexts. It was concluded that the presentation of a character rst, and the provision of its associated pinyin and English translation after a short delay is recommended when teaching characters for non-native speakers of Chinese at the early stage.

Most of the previous developmental studies on children’s learning of Chinese characters focus on age difference in their awareness of the functions of components in providing a clue to the meanings of characters. The present study takes a step further to investigate children’s awareness of the orthographic structures of characters and the implications of their development. This study used pseudo-characters formed by different combinations of components. There was the same component located in different positions in the orthographic structures of these pseudo-characters. 425 children in Grade 1 to 4 from 3 primary schools in Hong Kong were invited to a test to analyze these pseudo-characters. The results show that these junior children did not fully understand that a component only provides a clue to the meaning of a character when it is located in a certain position in the specific orthographic structure of the character and that the orthographic structure cannot be interpreted arbi...