Research on Chinese Character Literacy for CFL Learners

Claudia RossCollege of the Holy Cross

cross@holycross.edu

Speak First, Read SecondL1 Learners:

Shu, Hua and Richard C. Anderson. “Learning to Read Chinese: The Development of Metalinguistic Awareness.” Reading Chinese Script, A Cognitive Analysis. Ed. Wang, Inhoff, and Chen. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 1-18.

Findings: Children tap into their knowledge of spoken Chinese, using the phonetic element of unfamiliar characters to guess the pronunciation of characters they have not learned. That is, knowing words in their spoken form enhanced the ability of L1 leaerners to identify the characters used to write the words.

L2 Learners: advice

Dew, James. “Language is Primary, Script is Secondary: The Importance of Gaining a Strong Foundation in the Language Before Devoting Major Efforts to Character Recognition.” 汉字的认知与教学－西方学习者汉字认知国际研讨会 (Proceedings from the Conference on Cognition, Learning and Teaching of Chinese Characters) Ed. Guder, Jiang, and Wan.

Zhao Jinming ( 赵金铭 ). “ 初级汉语教学的有效途径 “先语后文”辩证” (“An effective approach to elementary Chinese teaching: The dialectic of ‘Starting with Oral Work and Character teaching follows”). Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a foreign language. 2010.

Stroke Order Knowledge Enhances Character Recognition

L1 Learners:

Huang, Jong-Tsun and Man-Ying Wang. “From Unit to Gestalt: Perceptual Dynamics in Recognizing Chinese Characters.” Language Processing in Chinese. Ed. Chen, Hsuan-Chih and Ovid Tzeng, Amsterdam: Elsevier Sciences Publishers, 1992. 3-35.

This study reports on several studies of character recognition among normal-brained adult native speakers.

All studies confirmed that when the segments of a character (either strokes, or 部件 ) were presented in normal sequence, native readers easily identified the characters, but when presented out of normal sequence, the subjects took longer to identify the character, or had difficulty identifying the character, or couldn’t identify the character.

L2 Learners:

Claudia Ross. “Visual Glueing: The relevance of stroke order for CFL learners. Presentation at the Annual Meeting of CLTA, Philadelphia, November 2012.

Click for character 1

Click for character 2

Students tested: Students in their 3rd and 7th semesters of Chinese at the College of the Holy Cross. Students in their 7th semester had all just returned from a semester or a year of study in China. Students in the 3rd semester had not studied abroad.

Both groups tested on strokes shown in conventional order

Both groups were able to identify characters.

7th semester students tested on strokes shown out of order. They could not identify any of the characters.

Conclusion: CFL learners appear to incorporate stroke order in their storage of characters in long-term memory. Either they have internalized stroke order rules, or stroke order generally follows an innate organizing principle (left to right, top to bottom) that is not specific to Chinese.

Implications1. Attention to stroke order appears to

enhance recognition.

2. CFL learners should be directed to focus on stroke order when learning characters.

3. Stroke order is one of a number of features of characters that learners should pay attention to in order to most efficiently learn characters.

First Strokes –Highest Information Load

L1 learners

Huang, Jong-Tsun and Man-Ying Wang. “From Unit to Gestalt: Perceptual Dynamics in Recognizing Chinese Characters.” Language Processing in Chinese. Ed. Chen, Hsuan-Chih and Ovid Tzeng, Amsterdam: Elsevier Sciences Publishers, 1992. 3-35.

They found that fluent native readers retrieve characters by stroke order; fluent L1 readers rely on the top left side of characters, and in most cases, the first strokes of a character, in their identification of characters.)

Awareness of Component Parts Enhances Character Recognition

L1 Learners

Flores d’Arcais, “Graphemic, Phonological, and Semantic Activation Processes during the Recognition of Chinese Characters.” Language Processing in Chinese. Ed. Chen, Hsuan Chi and Ovid Tzeng. Elsevier Sciences Publishers. 1992. 37-66.

The most successful L1 readers rely upon radicals, phonetics, and repeating components to retain and retrieve characters)

Shu, Hua and Richard C. Anderson. “Learning to Read Chinese: The Development of Metalinguistic Awareness.” Reading Chinese Script, A Cognitive Analysis. Ed. Wang, Inhoff, and Chen. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 1-18.

This is a study of reading acquisition by native speaking Chinese children in China.

They found that elementary school aged children are aware that certain parts of characters convey phonetic information and certain parts convey semantic information, and they are able to use that awareness to guess the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters and to correctly guess the form of characters for words they knew only in spoken form.

L2 Learners

Ke, Chuanren. “Effects of strategies on the learning of Chinese characters among foreign language students.” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 33.2 (1998): 93-112.

Ke found that CFL learners consider learning radicals to be more effective than learning phonetic components. They were split almost 50-50 as to which they believed to be more effective: learning character structure or writing characters repetitively.

L2 Learners

Shen, Helen. “Analysis of Radical Knowledge Development Among Beginning CFL Learners.” Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language. Ed. Everson, Michael and Helen Shen. Honolulu: NFLRC, 2010. 45-65.

This study builds on the findings of previous studies that awareness of the recurring parts of characters aids in recognition and production. It examines the perceived difficulty that students have in identifying and memorizing the semantic or phonetic role of recurrent parts of characters.

Elaboration vs. Rote Memorization

L1 Research

Shen, Helen. “Level of Cognitive Processing: Effects on Character Learning Among Non-Native Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language.” Language and Education 18.2 (2004): 167-183.

Shen found that instructor guided ‘elaboration’ incorporated in character instruction, including focus on radicals and phonetics, greatly enhances character retention when compared with rote memorization without input from instructor on memorization techniques.

Character Load and RetentionStudies on L2 learners (CFL learners)

Jen, Theresa and Ping Xu. “Penless Chinese. “ Sino-Platonic Papers. Ed. Victor H. Mair. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000. 1-15.

The study tested the character retention rate of students at an ivy league university who had studied 550 characters in their first year Chinese course. They found that students retained 39% (214) of the characters that they had studied. They did not report whether they were testing the production or recognition of characters.

Meng, Yeh, Pei-Chia Chen, and Claudia Ross, “Character retention among CFL learners.” Presentation at the Annual Meeting of CLTA, Philadelphia, November 2012.

This study found that as the number of characters introduced in a first year college-level Chinese program increases, the percentage of characters that students can identify and produce declines.

Students tested: College students at end of 2nd semester of a beginning level Chinese class at 3 different US colleges.

84 students used Integrated Chinese and had learned 448 characters at time of testing. (“write-all” approach)

47 students used Routledge Course in Modern Mandarin and had learned 161 characters at time of testing. (“selective” approach)

RecognitionWrite all approach

“Learned” 448 characters

Recognized 76.5% (tone errors ignored); 67.3% (including tone)

Selective approach

“Learned” 161 characters

Recognized 94.2% (tone errors ignored); 83.9% (including tone)

ProductionWrite all approach

“Learned” 448 characters

Produced (wrote) correctly: 45.9%

Selective approach

“Learned” 161 characters

Produced (wrote) correctly: 83.8%

Pinyin – help or hindrance?It depends

Help: Conveys and reinforces pronunciation.

Hindrance:

When paired with characters, distracts CFL students* from characters. Gaze directly to pinyin and remains there.

*whose L1 is English and is written with an alphabet

Meng Yeh eyetracking study, (presented at CLTA in 2011)