Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
RESULTS
Results of Class Observations
In the participants’ classroom teaching, the time spent on character writing ranged from 15 to 25 minutes in a lesson period (50 minutes each), depending on the objectives and time allocation of a particular class. Nonetheless, this component was seen to be carried out in five types of activities: warm-up, introduction of new characters, communicative activities, review of learned characters, and evaluation of homework or review quizzes. The introduction of the new characters of a lesson was, as designated in the course syllabus, conducted in the initial part of a lesson period, in which the teacher used explicit orthographic knowledge either in English or Chinese and consistently took five steps: (i) presenting the whole characters with flashcards, on which radicals were red-color coded, and explaining the meaning of a radical and its semantic relationship with the corresponding character; (ii) eliciting pronunciation and tones from students, modeling the target pronunciation and tone, and having the students read aloud; (iii) presenting the target character again with flashcards, on which each analyzable part was coded with a different color; (iv) grouping characters together with the same radical, and making phrases or sentences to reinforce their semantic meaning; (v) writing the character under discussion on board component by component and finally working at the stroke level. Meanwhile, the teachers made up stories and/or used pictures to show the evolution of a particular character or make connections between the character and a real object. The purpose of using pictures and stories, as informed by one of the trainees in the follow-up interview, was to facilitate recognition and retention and make characters interesting to the learners. Such practices showed that the participants actively used KAL promoted in the pedagogy course and demonstrated consistency with their preventive strategies articulated in the think-aloud protocols.
Since orthography instruction was only one of the components in the curriculum and it was basically focused on introducing new characters and reviewing learned ones, not much time was spent having the students write characters in class. The bulk of the students’ character writing task was carried out when they did homework. Therefore, the teachers did not have much opportunity to use their well-articulated corrective strategies in class except in the warm-up and review activities. When they did, they often called the students to the board to write characters or sentences. When an error was made, two treatments were noticed. When there was plenty of lesson time left, the teacher would ask the class things like: Is this character correct? What’s wrong with it? After satisfactory information was obtained, the teacher would model the writing and elaborate on the character configuration and stroke structures. When the class was running out of time, the teacher would either ignore the error or tell the class straightforward “This character is wrong,” without giving any further explanation. In the follow-up interviews, the teacher would be very surprised when told that there was an error on the board that had gone unnoticed. Or when asked why she did not spend any time analyzing the noticed error, the teacher would say, “I know that, but I ran out of time today. I had many other activities lined up.”
