Transfer facilitation effects of morphological awareness on multicharacter word reading in Chinese as a foreign language

Abstract

This study examined the transfer facilitation effects from English morphological awareness on Chinese multicharacter word reading in English-speaking adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). Fifty English-speaking American university CFL learners participated in our study who measured their English morphological awareness, Chinese morphological awareness, Chinese linguistic knowledge, Chinese word reading, and working memory. There were three major findings: (1) with approximately three years of formal Chinese instruction and limited Chinese print input, English-speaking adult learners of Chinese developed sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of multicharacter words in Chinese. (2) English morphological awareness did not directly contribute to Chinese bimorphemic three-character pseudoword reading yet contributed indirectly via the joint serial mediation by Chinese morphological awareness and Chinese monomorphemic two-character real word reading. (3) There was no additional influence from Chinese linguistic knowledge on Chinese word reading. And, English morphological awareness explained about 3.64% of the variance in second language Chinese bimorphemic three-character pseudoword reading. Discussion is provided regarding the transfer facilitation mechanism through which first language morphological awareness contributes to adult second language reading acquisition.

Designing an Intelligent Teaching System of Chinese as a Foreign Language under the Internet Background

“…ey are learning CFL through teachers' teaching and acquiring knowledge of Chinese as a foreign language through mutual communication among students. e student phase is a method in which students learn from one another to enhance their knowledge level [30,31]. If the teaching problem to be solved is the minimum value problem, let x be the independent variable and f(x) represent the objective function of the teaching optimization problem.…”