Developing Chinese Orthographic Awareness: What Insights into Characters do Beginning Level Chinese as a Foreign Language Textbooks Provide? - Softcover

Fan, Melissa H-M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3843365512 ISBN 13: 9783843365512

Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2010

Synopsis

The critical aspect of the non-alphabetic Chinese orthography for English-speaking learners is that it does not reflect the sounds of the spoken language. To develop proficiency in reading Chinese, readers develop Chinese orthographic awareness to identify and infer the sound and meaning of characters through analysis of their internal components. The learners' sensitivity to a structural component is influenced by the particular characters they are exposed to and to instruction by the teacher. In the CFL context, since reliable target language input is limited largely to textbook materials and teacher instruction, it is important to more rigorously examine the inventory of characters that is typically presented in CFL textbooks. This book describes and classifies the characters used in ten CFL textbooks designed for college and adult beginning learners for character frequency selection, radical semantic transparency, phonetic element reliability, etc. This book should be useful to textbook writers as they integrate orthographic information into their textbooks, to teachers in emphasizing character components, and to researchers in selecting characters for their experiments.

About this title

About the Author:

Ph.D. in Foreign Language and English as a Second Language (ESL) Education at the University of Iowa. Dr. Fan was born in Taiwan and her first language is Hakka. Research interests include vocabulary and reading development, explicit orthographic awareness instruction, and concepts about print for both English and Chinese learners.

About this edition

• Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 3843365512
• ISBN 13: 9783843365512
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216