First Advisor

Marjorie Terdal

Date of Publication

7-9-1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Department

Teaching English as a Second Language

Language

English

Subjects

Chinese language -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- English speakers, Chinese language -- Phonetics

DOI

10.15760/etd.7202

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, vii, 160 p.)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the teaching of phoneticideograph rules would improve the memorization and character retention abilities of English-speaking students of Chinese. Two groups participated in the experiment, an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was taught using the Concentrated Character Recognition Method, which employs the teaching of phonetic-ideograph rules, while the other group was taught using a more traditional teaching approach, without receiving instruction on phonetic-ideographic rules. Subjects were enrolled in the first-year university Chinese class. All subjects were pre-tested before the treatment. Data of subjects who scored much higher than the others on the pre-test were excluded from the analysis. The number of subjects who participated in the study was 30. One group of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese also participated in the rare character test of the study. A short-term character recall test was held on the sixth week of the treatment. A long-term character recall test was held on the ninth week of the treatment. One rare-character test was given to both groups and to the group of native speakers. The experimental group performed better than the control group on both the short-term character recall test and the long-term character recall test. Moreover, the experimental group predicted pronunciation more accurately than the control group on the rare-character test, and their performance was closer to the level of the group of native speakers than the control group.

Rights

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Comments

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/30658

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