1. Chinese literacy PGCE Session Prof.Yangguang Chen

2. Introduction As the teaching of Chinese in UK schools, both in the independent and state sectors, continues to grow, there is a need to gain a clear understanding of the particular challenges involved in studying a language that differs in such fundamental ways from English. Amongst these challenges none is greater than that posed by the Chinese system of writing. This session seeks to explore the issues involved in enabling UK school students with no background in Chinese to develop literacy skills in the language. By identifying key principles and a range of strategies to support teaching and learning, it is hoped to provide theoretical and practical insights which will ensure that the process is both effective and engaging for learners.

3. Introduction In this session we draw extensively on our experience as course tutors on the Flexible PGCE Secondary in Mandarin at Goldsmiths College, which involves us in working closely with a range of schools where Mandarin is taught and in providing guidance on appropriate methodology. The outline for the session is drafted as follows: 1. Evolution of Chinese writing system and its cultural significance 2. What are the challenges for learners of CAL (Chinese as an Additional Language) 3. What key pedagogical principles should be observed in approaching literacy development in Chinese?

4. Evolution Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the 2nd millenium BC and that there is no evidence to suggest the transmission of writing from elsewhere. The earliest recognisable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC (Shang dynasty) and were inscribed on ox scapulae and turtle shells – ‘oracle bones’. The forms or shapes of the characters have also undergone change. On the oracle bones many characters are clear pictographs. Their modern descendants have been so stylized, abbreviated, distorted, and otherwise modified that it is often difficult to see the relationship with the ancestral character.

5. Evolution This evolution can be illustrated by the following example (from De Francis 1984a:83) m ǎ 'horse‘, showing the loss of iconicity. The styles illustrated are those of the Shang oracle bones, the Great Seal style of the Zhou dynasty, the Small Seal style of the short- lived Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C.), and the Scribal and Regular styles of the Han dynasty (206 b.c.-220 A.D.), the last being the most commonly used script until the official simplification of characters in the PRC in the 1950s.

6. Simplification In earlier times most literature was produced in a style loosely called ’classical Chinese’ that was written by people who spoke some form of language ancestral to the varieties of current ‘Chinese’. Such literature was also produced by many people who were not even native speakers of Chinese, but who adopted the system for want of a script of their own. The Simplified script (a.k.a. Simplified Chinese) was officially adopted in the People's Republic of China in 1949 in an effort to eradicate illiteracy. The simplified script is also used in Singapore but the older traditional characters are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia.

7. Simplification A second round of simplifications which was published in 1977 but proved very unpopular and was abandoned in 1986. About 2,000 characters have been simplified in a number of different ways (the simplified characters are shown in red): Many simplified characters are based on commonly used abbreviations: Others retain only one part from the traditional character.

8. Simplification Some replace the phonetic element of the traditional character with a simpler one that is pronounced in the same or in a similar way: In some cases, several traditional characters are represented by one simplified character:

9. Main characteristics Chinese is a kind of a pictorial language, totally different from Latin Romanisation. There is no alphabet and no connection between the written and spoken language. Every word is a different picture and has to be memorised separately. A person can learn to read and write Chinese without knowing how to speak a word, or one can learn to talk in Chinese but cannot read and write. The system is direct contrast to the alphabetic principle of English selling in how they represent meaning (semantic features of language) and speech (phonological features). This has actually created its complexity. Chinese has its unified written form since the first dynasty ‘Jin’ but differs immensely in pronunciation, which developed into over hundred of different dialects. In a word, we read and write the same (let alone the difference between classical form and simplified form) but talk differently.

10. Spoken Chinese Chinese is a family of closely-related but mutually unintelligible languages. These languages are known variously as fāngyán (regional languages), dialects of Chinese or varieties of Chinese. All varieties of Chinese belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages and each one has its own dialects and sub-dialects, which are more or less mutually intelligible. However there are some notable features: All varieties of Chinese are tonal, for example Mandarin has 4 tones, Cantonese has between 6 and 9 (it depends who you ask) and Taiwanese has 7 tones. The major varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible, but most people in China and Taiwan who don't speak Mandarin as their first language, can speak or at least understand it a bit. Each of the major varieties of Chinese has numerous dialects. For example, Mandarin can be divided into northern, southern and south- western dialects, which are more or less mutually intelligible.

11. Spoken Chinese Many people in the west may think that the Chinese language is Cantonese whereas in fact Cantonese is just one of the eight major dialects of the Chinese language. Mandarin, known to English speakers as ‘language of official’ is based on the pronunciation of the Northern dialect (which has many sub-dialects under it) and spoken by 80 percent of the Chinese population. Therefore, it grew to become ‘national language’ 国 语 (guoyu) in the Republican period (1912-1949), a term still in use in Taiwan and some Chinese communities outside the Mainland. In the People’s Republic the name for it is ‘common language’ 普 通 话 (putonghua). Other terms such Han language or Hua language 汉 语, 华 语 (hanyu or huayu) is used in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, as Han Chinese are making up 93 percent of the Chinese population. Mandarin is taught in schools and spoken by television and radio presenters in Mainland China, and our GCSE course thus deals with Mandarin Chinese 普 通 话 / 国 语 (‘Putonghua’/ ‘Guoyu’).

12. Spoken Chinese Various systems have been devised for transcribing Chinese sounds into the Latin script, which make Chinese accessible to our modern technology (e.g. computer). The system used in Mandarin is called 拼 音 (Pinyin) and was first introduced in 1958 as the official system, and now is best known and universally adopted by news agencies as well as educational institutions. In dictionary, Pinyin is given next to the character to indicate the sound, and it serves as a bridge for students to have an easy access to Chinese language (both spoken and written). The biggest difficulty in its phonetic part is the tone. There are four tones, five if you include the neutral tone. Each character has its own tone or in other words, different tones are referred to different characters. What makes learning even more difficult is that the same tone may have different characters But don’t take it too serious as when you talk, you have a specific context (sentence) and people will understand you even if you don’t get a perfect tone.

13. Written Chinese The Chinese writing system an open-ended one, meaning that there is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters enables you to to read about 99% of the characters in Chinese newspapers and magazines. To read Chinese literature, technical writings or Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with about 6,000 characters. Written Chinese are constructed via three-tier (orthographic) structure: characters, radicals, and strokes. Characters can be classified into two categories according to their physical structure: integral characters and compound characters. An integral character contains only one radical. For instance, the character for people ( 人 ), the character for mouth 口 (kou), the character for water 水 (shui), the character for month or moon 月 (yue), all consist of single radical.

14. Written Chinese Radicals can be further classified into two categories: phonetic radicals and semantic radicals. Theoretically, a phonetic one represents the sound of a character and semantic one provides clues to the meaning of the character. It is estimated that about 90% of modern Chinese characters are phonetic- semantic compounds. Each compound character contains at least two radicals, one indicating the sound of the character and the other its meaning. For example, the compound character for recognition, ‘ 认 ’ (ren) has two radicals: the right one ‘ 人 ’ indicates the sound of the character people and the one the left ‘ 言 ’(yan) means speech or language. Strokes are the basic building materials for radicals, for example the radical for people ‘ 人 ’ (ren) consists of two strokes; the character or radical for soil ‘ 土 ’ (tu) has three strokes.

15. Written Chinese Chinese word formation is another unique feature: Chinese is famous for its two character words and four word phrases or idioms, e.g. weather in Chinese is 天 气 (tianqi), meaning air on the sky. Although a single character has it own root meaning, it is hard to grasp its usage. So we normally need to find another character to complete its specific meaning e.g. ‘ 高兴 ’(gaoxing) or ‘ 高 级 ’ (gaoji), There are thousands of similar word formation, like trading 买 卖 (maimai), time 时 间 (shijian), immediately 马 上 (mashang), computer 电 脑 (diannao), telephone 电 话 (dian hua), make telephone calls 打 电 话 (da dian hua), where ‘ 打 ’ (da) is a character meaning to hit, when it going with people means beat someone 打 人 (daren), but when it goes with telephone, its meaning changes to be making a phone call. The same with ball means doing sports, playing balls, whatever basket ball, foot ball or table-tennis 打 球 (daqiu). Therefore I would say, the term ‘learning Chinese characters’ means to learn Chinese words, and to encourage imagination and creative mind.

16. What are the challenges? Chinese is considered to be one of the most challenging languages to learn by non-native learners, and especially so for monolingual English speaking children in the UK. This is primarily due to the nature of Chinese orthography. Phonological difficulties （语音学上的难度） Morphological difficulties （词态学上的困难） Logographical significance （标识意义） Memory load （记忆量）

17. Phonological difficulties Phonological awareness in Chinese is very different from English and many other Latin scripts. Chinese as a logographic script lacks obvious sound-script correspondence or in other words, phonemic awareness is irrelevant for Chinese character recognition. Characters serving as graphic symbols do not provide clear clues to its pronunciation, whereas in English it is important for children to be able to identify individual speech sounds or phonemes. Most readers of alphabets can eventually assimilate letter-phoneme correspondences which are relatively regular, and use these correspondence rules to learn to read new words on their own. Thus, the method of speech-sound manipulation is often used to measure if phonological awareness has bee obtained.

18. Phonological difficulties However, such manipulation is not required in Chinese literacy as orthography- phonology correspondence rules in Chinese are much less reliable. Phonological awareness even differs across regions among Chinese. For example, children in Hong Kong are taught to read characters using the ‘look and say’ method, without any benefit of any phonological coding system while children in Taiwan use Zhuyin Fuhao, a sub-syllabic coding system, and children in Mainland China and Singapore use Hanyu Pinyinfor character instruction. Pinyin proves to be most acceptable device for transcribing Chinese sounds into the Latin script.

19. Morphological difficulties Another major challenging to the learner is the complexity of the graphic configuration of Chinese characters. A morpheme is the smallest of unit of meaning in a language. In the English word ‘books’ there are two morphemes. Book is the root word book, s stands for its plural form. In Chinese, characters represent morphemes as well as syllable. Visually, to learn a character is to master three linguistic components: sound, shape, and meaning. A Chinese word may be made up of one or more characters to present what in English would be a single word. For instance, weather in Chinese is made up of two characters: net ( 网 ) + ball ( 球 ). Chinese characters can either be used singly as a word in sentences or combine with other characters to form a word. The most common word formation is a two character structure. Although a single character has it own root meaning, it is hard to grasp its usage.

20. Logographical significance An integral character contains only one radical while a compound character contains more than one radicals or stroke components. Strokes are basic units of spelling in a word, which equally understood as letters in composition of an English word. There are a total of 30 distinguishable types of strokes, and the number of strokes in a character may vary from 1-30 (Huang and Liao, 1981). Similar to English, there are no rules about how many strokes (letters) a character (word) can have, however there are a set of sequences applied to writing a stroke, a radical and a complete character. Once we learn and memorise the sequence, as if we would naturally find the way out of the Labyrinth, and built on understanding of some basic radicals and components, we can easily enlarge our vocabulary. So the first and most challenging task is to learn those strokes and be able to memorise their name and sequence.

21. Memory load About 2-3 thousand vocabuary are needed for general reading and writing. Primary school graduates in China are required to have mastered 2000 words. However as a foreign language optional course - GCSE Chinese, students are required to have 3-500 characters applied for reading and writing. In the reading and responding assessment objective, students are required to read a range of authentic writtern material of varying lengths involving signs, notices, short advertisements, messages and letters, information leaflets and newspaper and magazine extracts. Whease, in the writing assessment objective, students are required to complete

22. Pedagogical principles Bilingual pedagogies The ‘target-language only’ approach is challenged in the L2 classroom. In contrast, bilingual pedagogies that enable students to compare and contrast English and Chinese may be more successful. Communicative approaches The rise of this approach can be seen as the response to recognition of the inadequacy of traditional ‘grammar/translation’ methods, and also of the 1950s audio-lingual model stressing speaking and listening but relied heavily on meaningless pattern drills and repetition to meet the needs their new publics. Strategies or steps to teach Three staged questions applied in literacy; character splitting approach; grammar taught in patterns; audio and visual aids in PPT and IWB.

23. Bilingual pedagogies The significant differences between L1 and L2 processes lie in the conditions under which they are normally learned. Firstly, ‘the child assimilates his / her native language unconsciously and unintentionally but acquires a foreign language with conscious realization and intention’ (Vygotsky, 1935, trans. 1962: 2-3). Krashen (1983) defines the two forms of language learning as acquired knowledge and learnt knowledge, and claims that all L1 knowledge and potentially some L2 knowledge are acquired knowledge which is acquired by a natural means in informal situations. Much L2knowledge is learnt knowledge, which is learnt by conscious understanding of rules in formal classroom situations.

24. Bilingual pedagogies Secondly, learning a first language is, in this sense, ‘learning how to mean’ (Halliday, 1975). People learning a second language already know how to mean. In other words, second language learners already have one language present in their minds. There is no way that the L2 learner can become a monolingual native speaker by definition (Cook, 1996: 7). Thirdly, the types of exposure to L1 and L2 are different. The frequency that the L1 learner and L2 learner being exposed to the language is varied. Generally speaking, the chances for the native child to become immersed in the first language are much more than the second language learner.

25. Bilingual pedagogies Fourthly, motivations and attitudes between L1 learners and L2 learners are quite different, which may also have significant effects on the learning process. Titone (1981) also claims that the reinforcers between L1 acquisition and L2 learning are different. L1 acquisition is conditioned by primary reinforcers, for instance, the need to express the wants and desires. Compare to the L1 acquisition, the reinforcers of the L2 learning are much weaker, such as the approval or a grade. Finally, in terms of culture, the L2 learner already forms certain perceptions towards the culture of the second language, which may have an influence on the learning (Titone, 1981). By comparison, the FL classroom, may be stressful or threatening, and this may inhibit language learning as well as affecting self-esteem. Classroom anxiety for whatever reason is a very strong factor working against language learning (Gibbons, 1993).

26. Communicative approaches Theories of L2 learning differ in the importance they attach to input and interaction. One of the academically useful forms of interaction in a sociolinguistic approach to language learning is communicative approach. Hymes (1972) claims that the competent language user not only commands accurately the grammar and vocabulary of the chosen target language, but also knows how to use that linguistic knowledge appropriately in a range of social situations. Johnson (1981) points out the problem with second language learners as ‘being structurally competent’ but ‘communicatively incompetent’ and thinks ‘being structurally correct is only part of what is involved in language ability’ (1981:9).

27. Strategies or steps to teach This method, and by far the best one, is to try and analyse the characters into their component parts. Most characters can be broken up into parts, parts into radicals and radicals into strokes, which when once learnt, can often be used to make up other characters. Step one – learning how to write strokes There are some 30 basic strokes that make up all the characters in Chinese (see the table below) learning names of the strokes and the direction of the strokes indicated by arrow applying pressure as indicated by the different shades of black. The darker it is, the more the pressure applied

28. Strategies or steps to teach Step two – learning to identify the radicals and components identifying the structure of the character, e.g. a left & a right, a top & a bottom, an inside & an outside components breaking the component into smaller components, e.g. … starting off with a set of sequences or (stroke-order) indicated by numbers at the beginning of each stroke as shown), e. g…. Step three – repetition and memorisation For every character that we study, make a separate card. On one side of the card, write the character, and nothing else. On the other side write the sound of the character and its meaning. In writing the sound we use Pinyin - a Latin script devised for transcribing Chinese sounds. It is best to make the cards as the study goes along, a new card for every new character. After we have acquired a few cards, we may review each one at times.

29. Reference Cook, V.J. (1996) Second Language Learning and Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, London Gibbons, P. (1993) Learning to learn in a second language, Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association, Australia. Hymes, D. (1972) ‘On communicative competence’ in J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics, Harmondworth: Penguin Books. Johnson, K. (1988) ‘Mistake correction’ in English Language Teaching Journal 42:89-96 Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic, London: Arnold. Krashen, S.D. (1982) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Pergamon. Titone, R. (1982) Second language learning: an integrated psycholinguistic model in B.Bain (ed) The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. New York: Plenum. Vygotsky, L.S (1962) Thought and Language, Cambridge, Mass: MIT press.