Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
RESULTS
Participants’ Comments on the Pedagogy Course
Participants’ comments on the pedagogy course elicited from the think-aloud protocol stressed the importance of theoretical training, teacher knowledge development, and pedagogical innovations promoted in the course (see Table 1). All the participants believed that the training in character writing raised their orthographic awareness and helped them formulate new working principles towards students’ character learning. For Question #1, which asked “which part of the pedagogy course do you think is most helpful to you?” the participants responded with theoretical training, knowledge development, and organizing teacher knowledge in lesson planning. For Question #2, which asked “what knowledge has helped you most in your follow-up teaching practice?” the responses were orthographic analysis, incorporation of real-life experience into classroom learning, and hands-on classroom teaching strategies and methods. For Question #3, which asked “taking character writing for example, how did you treat your students’ errors before and how do you treat them now?” the responses were change of attitude, use of innovative methods, and adoption of corrective and preventive strategies. Table 1 summarizes the participants’ qualitative comments on the three questions and gives the number of respondents for each comment.
Table 1 : Participants’ comments on the pedagogy course
Question #1
i) Theoretical training: “Without theories, a teacher has little room to improve.” (5)
ii) Character writing: “Character writing is the most difficult task to our students.” (4)
iii) Teaching practice: “It is really good to put into practice what we learned in the course.” (2)
Question #2
i) Error correction strategies: “Direct correction, indirect correction, and peer correction, of which the most important is indirect correction: Direct correction may frustrate the students.” (4)
ii) Incorporating real-life situation into classroom learning such as role play: “It is very important to make connections between learning and real-life experience.” (3)
iii) Orthographic analytical skills: “Instead of teaching characters stroke by stroke, we learned to teach them by components such as radicals, phonetics, and analyzable parts.” “After taking the course, I learned to first present the character as a whole, analyze the intracharacter components, explain the semantic meaning of the radicals, and create stories to enhance learning.” (3)
iv) Very basic, clear, simple, and practical knowledge such as “not to call the student by name before asking questions, moving quickly enough to retain students’ interest.” (2)
Question # 3
i) Changed attitude and treatments towards students’ character writing errors: “Before taking this course, I did not spend much time thinking about the reasons behind students’ errors.” “I would copy the error correction strategies from my own teachers when 1 was an elementary student. For instance, I would have them repeat writing the correct character for many times if they made an error in that character.” “I would not analyze the type of errors but evaluated as they did not learn correctly.” (6)
ii) Developed orthographic awareness and preventive strategies: “After taking this course, I teach characters through component analysis.” “ I think of ways to prevent errors. For instance, when I present new characters, I use color-coded flashcards, with red color to code radicals, and blue and black for the other parts.” “I develop their knowledge of radicals or make up a story to facilitate that.” (6)
