Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
The Pedagogy Course
The pedagogy course (three hours per week) was taught to six graduate students by the researcher in the spring semester 2001. The class was conducted in the format of lecture, presentation, and discussion. To fulfill the course requirements, the participants were required to make three oral presentations, three class observation reports, five journal/book article reading summaries, two 15-minute-long teaching demonstrations, and a research paper. Meanwhile, the participants learned to use Chinese orthographic terms/names to describe the character formation, the basic stroke type/order, the intracharacter components, and the configuration dimensions. They were also instructed to use these terms in their actual teaching and to have their students “use both hands and mouths” by naming the stroke type/order while writing new characters and using orthographic terms when analyzing characters.
To reinforce their learning, the participants were, during the course, encouraged to apply such knowledge and teaching techniques in their microteaching activities. Moreover, using the writing samples collected from 101 CFL learners at low/high beginning and intermediate levels of two New England universities in the spring semester 2001 (Xiao, 2002), the participants analyzed learners’ orthographic errors from the phonological, graphemic, and semantic perspectives. For the purpose of data analysis, graphemically based errors included substitutions of graphically similar characters and structural violations, phonological errors included substitutions of homophones or phonetically-similar characters, and semantic errors included substitutions of synonyms or lexically related characters. The participants were aware that some errors resulted from a single source, while others from combined sources such as phonological-semantic or graphemic-phonological. Through the error analysis, the participants learned to examine the orthographic developmental trend of the CFL learners and to explore relevant teaching methods.
