A Form-Focused Approach for Teaching
and Learning Chinese Characters
Sun Jizhen
(孙纪真)
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.