The road to successful Chinese language learning: Effective strategies for teaching and learning Chinese characters

Abstract

Chinese is an ideographic language with a huge number of characters. Readers need to learn word by word in order to pick up the meaning and the pronunciation of each character. As a result, the learning outcome is disappointing and the sustainability is low in comparison with most other languages. Many people (especially those learning Chinese as a second language) come to a conclusion that learning Chinese language is too difficult for them, while gradually losing their interest or even giving up their learning. The ability to recognize Chinese characters is fundamental to Chinese language learning. In order to learn the characters effectively, the students should master two critical features – the components and the structures. There are about 540 foundational components. These components constitute characters which fit into a square space in a text, and can be further classified into 15 spatial structures (Huang, 2003; Ki et al., 2003; Tse, 2000). The 77 commonly used components constitute approximately 1,500 characters (Tse, 2006; Tse et al., 2008). Students who are aware of components and structures can gain implicit knowledge from the multilevel representation of characters (Shu et al., 2000). The Integrative Perceptual Approach for teaching Chinese characters (Tse, Marton, Ki & Loh, 2007), based on the phenomenographic approach (Marton & Booth, 1997) to learning, has been proven to be an effective strategy to develop students’ awareness of components and structures, and to increase their literacy level (e.g. Lee et al., 2011; Loh et al., 2013; Tse & Loh, 2014; Tse et al., 2007; 2012). By using meaningful contexts and students’ own language as the basic teaching materials, structural features, written forms and pronunciations are taught systematically and simultaneously. Students learn characters in relational clusters, discern the similarities and variations among these related characters, and the teacher highlights and emphasises the crucial aspects of Chinese characters and words. This chapter will introduce various effective strategies of teaching Chinese characters to which this Integrative Perceptual Approach is applied. This should fill the pedagogical gap of the existing IB Chinese Language B curriculum with complementary ways of enhancing Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) students’ reading ability.