Asia's Orthographic Dilemma

Hannas, William C.

doi:10.1515/9780824861537

Cited by 92 publications

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“…Hence, in a sense, characters help to resolve the homophony of Chinese speech. This argument is frequently presented as an advantage of the character-based writing system, though it is not clear whether this system is here not solving the problem that was invited by its usage [44]. 11 Not counting those heteronyms that arise because an English had more than 2 meanings.…”

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Rank-frequency relation for Chinese characters

Deng¹,

Allahverdyan

et al. 2014

Eur. Phys. J. B

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We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long Chinese texts (or for mixtures of short Chinese texts), rank-frequency relations for Chinese characters display a two-layer, hierarchic structure that combines a Zipfian power-law regime for frequent characters (first layer) with an exponential-like regime for less frequent characters (second layer). For these two layers we provide different (though related) theoretical descriptions that include the range of low-frequency characters (hapax legomena). The comparative analysis of rank-frequency relations for Chinese characters versus English words illustrates the extent to which the characters play for Chinese writers the same role as the words for those writing within alphabetical systems.

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“…A simpler explanation would be that the characters are perceived as pictograms directly pointing to their meaning. In its literal form this explanation is not correct, since characters-pictograms are not frequent in Chinese[37,44].…”

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Rank-frequency relation for Chinese characters

Deng¹,

Allahverdyan

et al. 2014

Eur. Phys. J. B

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“… 1 Other sources verify that the many dialects of Chinese can be considered different languages because they are not mutually understood (e.g., DeFrancis, 1984; Hannas, 1997), while differences between the Spanish dialects of Latin America are relatively small (e.g., Zentella, 2004). …”

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Does Bilingual Education Interfere with English-Language Acquisition?*

Conger

2010

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. In 1975, the Puerto Rican community successfully sued the New York City Department of Education, mandating the city to provide bilingual education to its Spanish‐speaking English learner (EL) students. The settlement, known as the “Aspira Consent Decree,” has been amended over time to include EL students of all language groups and now requires public schools that have at least 15 students of the same language group in two contiguous grades to offer bilingual education. Yet observational studies of bilingual education classrooms in the city document that Spanish‐speaking EL students may be the only language group that receives native‐language instruction, while students from other language groups who are enrolled in bilingual education primarily receive English instruction. Method. I use this difference in treatment dosage to estimate the effect of bilingual education on the time that it takes students to learn English. Results and Conclusions. Students who enroll in bilingual education classrooms learn English less quickly, but the effect of bilingual education is the same for Spanish‐speaking and other students, implying that negative selection mechanisms are at work.

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“…Adapting an alien model to Chinese can lead to practices that contribute to perpetuating an erroneous, misinformed and to a certain extent orientalist discourse about the language. This discourse unquestioningly reproduces an attitude some experts have been denouncing for decades (see DeFrancis, 1984;Hannas, 1997;Unger, 2004;Casas-Tost & Rovira-Esteva, 2009). In this context of change within the field of language teaching and specifically of the teaching of Chinese in Spain, we question once again the applicability of European models to Chinese and the assumption that the models are universally valid, requiring no adjustments.…”

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New models, old patterns? The implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages for Chinese

Casas-Tost

Rovira-Esteva

2014

Linguistics and Education

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The last few years have seen a change in the paradigm of language teaching and learning with the introduction of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In Spain, the CEFR has been implemented for Chinese in the same standardised way as for other languages. This overstrict implementation has not taken into account the particularities of Chinese. Consequently, Chinese has often been distorted in academic curricula to adapt it to this new approach. We question the application of European models to Chinese and the assumption that those models are universally valid, requiring no adjustments. We believe that this assumption reproduces old ways of approaching the Other, based on ethnocentrism, and perpetuates old myths and an orientalist discourse about the Chinese language, which have been criticised for decades by some linguists and should be a thing of the past. We critically analyse current adaptations of the CEFR to Chinese in Spain and suggest alternatives to the prevailing trends in scholarship on Chinese linguistics. We can thus establish models that do not reproduce old-fashioned patterns and attitudes and that enable us to describe Chinese in its own terms.

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Asia's Orthographic Dilemma

Cited by 92 publications

References 0 publications

Rank-frequency relation for Chinese characters

Rank-frequency relation for Chinese characters

Does Bilingual Education Interfere with English-Language Acquisition?*

New models, old patterns? The implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages for Chinese

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