A Form-Focused Approach for Teaching and Learning Chinese Characters

 

Sun Jizhen (孙纪真)

Chinese Culture University

 

Chinese characters have always been considered a significant challenge for beginner learners of Chinese as a second language. This difficulty is largely the result of the prevalent rote memorization-based character learning method, an approach that does not treat characters as a unique linguistic system in their own right. Studies have shown that a learner’s level of orthographic awareness, which includes recognizing the spatial configuration, semantic and/or phonetic components, and graphic form of a character, is a measure predicting her future reading proficiency. With this theoretical framework in mind, we designed a form-focused curriculum and conducted a 30-hour study with 8 adult beginner learners of Chinese from various language backgrounds who initially could not read or write any characters. This study reports how the learners acquired these 225 characters through the form-focused method. They first learned the names of different strokes and stroke-order by learning the numbers 1 through 10. Pictographs and simple ideographs were introduced next, followed by associative ideographs and form-sound graphs. The curriculum was designed in order to cultivate learners’ orthographic awareness and cultural interest. Therefore, in addition to naming each stroke and analyzing its spatial configuration, each new character was introduced with a brief explanation of its origin using digital images of various graphic styles throughout history. Small group activities with meta-linguistic discussion helped learners discriminate between similar characters, recognize spatial configurations with different components, and differentiate between the same components functioning as either phonetic or semantic cue. By the end of the study, the learners were able to write from memory the majority of these 225 characters in correct stroke order. They could also discriminate between different characters with the same sound and tone, recognize semantic and phonetic cues in associative graphs and form-sound graphs, and read short paragraphs composed of learned characters. The results from weekly feedback and in-depth interviews indicated that learners found this type of instruction helpful for them to internalize, retrieve, and apply the intrinsic information a character conveys. In addition, they felt that characters were not as difficult to master as they first imagined, and they were culturally and linguistically interesting to learn.