Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese
RESULTS
Preventive Strategies Articulated in the Think-Aloud Protocols
To prevent errors in students’ future learning, the participants articulated a variety of strategies in the think-aloud protocols. These strategies include (i) raising learner orthographic awareness (i.e., decomposing characters into radicals, phonetics, and analyzable subcomponents), (ii) using explicit orthographic knowledge for explanation (i.e., explicitly teaching stroke rules, radical rules, phonetic rules, configuration rules, corrective/preventive strategies, etc.), (iii) providing new information with appropriate sequencing and visual aids or mnemonics, (iv) reinforcing information with review, practice, comparison, and contrast. (See Table 4.)
Table 4. Participants’ qualitative comments on preventive strategies
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(i) Raising learners’ orthographic awareness 40 (37.74%)
a. To prevent errors, we need to help students develop relevant orthographic knowledge and raise their awareness as such.
b. Teach the students to write each of the sub-component and then assemble them together by following the configuration rules. In this way, the writing of the high-density characters becomes a fun block-building game.
c. Some of my students prepare their own flashcards. I ask them to color-code the components, because the visual images of the parts can help them reduce the memory load and help them memorize the character easily.
(ii) Using explicit orthographic knowledge for explanation 39 (36.79%)
a. To prevent errors at the stroke level, we need to help students develop explicit concept/ knowledge of strokes such as dian, heng, shu, pie, na, wan, henggou, shugou, xiegou, hengzhe,, shuzhe.
b. Explain the semantic meaning of the radical and its relationship with the corresponding character.
c. For characters which has exactly the same components and finals, we need to explicitly explain their configurations.
d. Explain the origin of the character and show the evolution.
(iii) Effectively providing new information 14 (13.20%)
a. 1 would try to space out graphically/phonetically/semantically similar characters in order to avoid confusion.
b. When I introduce a new character, I use a color-coded flashcard with the radical being coded with red and the phonetic with a different color to make them aware that this character consists of two components.
c. When teaching yu “rain,” I draw a picture of rain dropping and tell the students that the four dots are rain drops.
d. I often try to make stories, so the students can remember the character more easily. For example, ting “listen:” listen to the king, the ear of the king, ten for one heart.
e. When we introduce a new character, we should contextulize it so that the students can remember its meaning.
(iv) Reinforcing information with practice, comparison, or contrast 13 (12.27%)
a. It is important to group the graphically similar characters together and then compare and contrast them.
b. I will compare the graphically similar forms, point out their differences, and make semantic connections.
c. To prevent such errors, comparisons must be done to show the graphic difference between the components.
d. Emphasizing and reinforcing new information to the students help them with understanding and memory.
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Total 106 (100%)
As shown in Table 4, out of the 106 responses for preventive strategies, there are 40 (37.74%) in favor of raising learners’ orthographic awareness, 39 (36.79%) in favor of using explicit orthographic knowledge for explanation, 14 (13.20%) in favor of effectively providing new information, and 13 (12.27%) in favor of reinforcing information with practice, comparison, or contrast. The participants seem to put much more weight on raising orthographic awareness and using KAL than providing and reinforcing information.
