Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
THE STUDY
Data Analysis
Data analysis was both qualitative and quantitative. For the purpose of data analysis, the think-aloud protocols were all transcribed, coded, and categorized. While the participants’ comments from Part A were used to gain insights of their beliefs and perceptions about the pedagogical training, Part B was coded and analyzed to explore their performance in error identification and formulation of corrective and preventive strategies. For error identification, one point was given if the participant correctly named the error type. For the corrective strategies, one point was given if the comment fell into any of the six categories, such as repeated writing, intra-character component analysis, stroke analysis (i.e., stroke type/order), practicing target characters in contexts (i.e., words or sentences), reading aloud, and modeling (i.e., teacher demonstration on board). And for the preventive strategies, one point was given if the comment fell into any of the four categories such as raising learners’ orthographic awareness, effectively providing information, reinforcing information, and explicitly using orthographic knowledge. Class observations, which were classified into categories as designated in the observation guide, were used to examine the participants’ application of orthographic knowledge in their teaching practices and to determine how consistent it was with their articulation in the think-aloud protocols.
To examine the differences among the participants in error identification, statistical tests by Repeated Measures in General Linear Modal were conducted. In addition, Pearson Correlation was used to examine the relationship between the errors contained in the sample characters and those identified by the participants.
