Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
THE STUDY
Recent CFL research studies have provided ample evidence to show that Chinese language is difficult to learn (Brecht and Walton, 1994; Samimy and Lee, 1997), and character writing is one the most difficult aspects (Everson, 1998). In their 2000 CLTA (Chinese Language Teachers Association) survey, Ke et al. (2001) report that character learning was identified as the most difficult task by all the respondents composed of CFL teachers from colleges, pre-college schools, and heritage Chinese schools. Coupled with the high level of learning difficulty, there was a cry for qualified teachers. According to the report, the dearth of such teachers is due to “the lack of training programs that specifically designed for TCFL (Ke et al., 2001:41).”
To meet this need, the researcher was assigned to teach a course on CFL pedagogy to graduate students who were interested in teaching CFL and/or intended to pursue a Massachusetts State Chinese teacher certificate. The course was designed to address theoretical issues and pedagogical practices from the perspective of teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language, which included general L2 teaching methodologies, information processing theories, error correction analysis, effect of formal grammar instruction, etc. One course objective was to develop the participants’ knowledge in Chinese orthography, such as character structure and configuration, character density (number of strokes) effect, word superiority (orthographic unit recognition) effect, graphic/semantic/phonetic similarity effect, homophone interference, character encoding processes, etc.
By exploring the participants’ insights about their orthographic knowledge and pedagogical application after taking the pedagogy course, this study seeks to answer two questions: (1) How do novice CFL teachers provide corrective feedback for learners’ character writing errors? (2) How do novice CFL teachers formulate corrective and preventive strategies for character learning?
