Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
L2 research in the past decade shows that teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL), i.e., pedagogy-oriented explicit knowledge about the language systems or rules, largely influences teachers’ teaching practices and their pedagogical systems (Alderson et al., 1997; Andrews, 1997, 1999; Borg, 1998, 1999). According to Andrews (1997), KAL is a declarative form of teachers’ language awareness, while the application of KAL in teaching process is a procedural form of teachers’ language awareness, and the combination of these two is teachers’ metalinguistic awareness. In pedagogical application, the execution of teachers’ metalinguistic awareness includes providing explicit grammar knowledge and corrective feedback, which is believed to perform a crucial role in both language teaching and learning (Andrews, 1999:161). Although it awaits further research, such a claim can be made under the assumption that explicit knowledge and corrective feedback increase saliency of the target linguistic feature(s) and hence raise learners’ attention, consciousness, or awareness of that feature(s). According to information processing theories, learners’ attention, consciousness or awareness of target linguistic features is a necessary prerequisite for language processing and permanent acquisition of that feature(s) (Ellis, 1990; Schmidt, 1990; Fotos, 1993), with corrective feedback being an “input enhancing” form of such consciousness raising (Lightbown and Spada, 1990; Sharwood Smith, 1990).
Although the notion of metalinguistic awareness is well-oriented, research studies on its effect on L2 learning have yielded mixed results from both learner and teacher perspectives. For instance, after examining the relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and language proficiency from 509 first-year undergraduate students of French, Alderson et al (1997) found that explicit grammar knowledge did not improve the students’ language proficiency. However, Kinoshita (2002) reported that using metalinguistic knowledge, such as Japanese grammatical terms for semantic relationships, significantly enhanced the learning of particular linguistic features. Using three Japanese particles such as ‘ni,’ ‘de,’ and ‘o’ as the stimuli in a classroom experiment, which involved 18 beginning college students of Japanese, she found that the group which was provided with metalinguistic corrective feedback performed significantly better than the one which was not. On the other hand, by examining fourteen EFL teachers’ performance in grammar instruction and corrective feedback, Andrews (1997) found that the possession of KAL did not guarantee teachers with the ability to make that knowledge explicit in teaching process. Many of the teachers’ weaknesses in performance were more related to problems with procedural aspects (i.e., pedagogical operation) rather than with the underlying KAL. In his qualitative study of grammar teaching by four EFL teachers, Borg (1999) found varied teacher practices, such as promoting, minimizing, or avoiding in the using of explicit grammar knowledge. He suggested they resulted from an interacting range of experiential, cognitive, and contextual factors, potentially conflicting beliefs, theories and assumptions, etc.
Therefore, to fully understand the impact of metalinguistic awareness on teachers’ pedagogical applications, it is essential to observe how KAL is drawn on and applied in the teaching process. For this purpose, the present study intends to explore the level of novice CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) teachers’ explicit knowledge of Chinese orthography and their use of such knowledge in instructional decision making.
Unlike English, which is an alphabetic language with relatively transparent orthography-phonology mapping system, Chinese is a logographic language, with the grapheme-to-phoneme route being unavailable. In Chinese orthography, strokes are the basic spelling symbol, and characters are the basic unit for analysis (Packard, 2000). Structurally, strokes form components, and components form characters. Based on their internal complexity, characters are classified as simple characters (about 18% of the total number of Chinese characters), which consist of a single unanalyzable component, and compound characters (about 82% of the total), which are comprised of two analyzable components with distinct functions: semantic radical and phonetic element (Shu, et al., 1999). In principle, the phonetic element conveys the sound of the corresponding character, while the radical contains semantic meaning which has a relationship with the corresponding character, such as category-member, material-product, instrument-function, etc. The Chinese writing system contains 214 radicals and 1,100 phonetic elements. These components form recurring combinations to assemble the thousands of Chinese characters in multi-dimensional configurations, such as left to right, top to bottom, outside to inside, etc. In such configurations, the radicals and phonetics are in fixed positions. Violation of their positioning causes erroneous variations or non-characters.
As such, the Chinese logographic morphology consists of rules and principles, by which characters are composed and decomposed. L1 research studies show that adult native speakers can automatically decompose the intracharacter components and access to their properties (Zhou, et al., 1999). However, before they accumulate a large enough reservoir of characters to generalize such rules, CFL beginners have to rely on their visual familiarity when processing characters. Consequently, they view characters as unanalyzable wholes comprised of stacks of strokes and memorize them as such. Moreover, the frequently recurring combinations of radicals and phonetics results in effects of semantic, graphic, and phonetic similarities. And the limited Chinese syllables (about 400 in total), which are employed in the 5,000 commonly used characters, generate a large quantity of homophones in the orthography (Xu, et al.,1999). As a result, beginning CFL learners often make various orthographic errors caused by homophone interference, structural violation, graphic/semantic/phonetic similarity effect, etc.
