What makes learning Chinese characters difficult? The voice of students from English secondary schools

Juan, Yang

doi:10.1177/2513850217748501

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Based on related research (e.g., Chen, 2016;Liu, 2009;Luo, 2014;Spencer, 2015, Weber, 2017Yang, 2018), two questionnaires were developed, one for learners and one for curriculum designers. The questionnaire items were on a 5-point Likert scale (from Strongly Agree = 5 to Strongly Disagree = 1) and were designed to measure participants' views.…”

Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese Language in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Recommendations

Al-Shammari¹

2020

ELT

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This study identifies potential challenges for learners, teachers, and curriculum designers regarding the recent inclusion of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in the Saudi education system, according to an in-depth review of previous research. This review focused on issues related to CFL learning, pedagogy, and curriculum. Factors were grouped into five categories: 1) CFL learning difficulty, 2) learner motivation and aptitude, 3) learner culture, 4) pedagogical effectiveness, and 5) curriculum design. To gain a deeper understanding, a sample of 25 foreign language learners and 15 curriculum designers was selected randomly from a university in the north of Saudi Arabia to complete a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were employed to highlight the most important issues. The data analysis revealed serious concerns among CFL learners, such as language difficulty, learner motivation and aptitude, and learner culture. CFL pedagogy could also pose a challenge. However, no concerns were found related to CFL curriculum. Implications and recommendations are offered to help incorporate CFL into the Saudi education system and encourage further research.

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Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese Language in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Recommendations

Al-Shammari¹

2020

ELT

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“…Studies on learners' beliefs about Chinese language learning have suggested that most learners consider writing characters the most challenging aspect (Ye, 2013). A recent study by Yang (2018) explored learners' beliefs about the importance of learning Chinese characters and their learning strategies. This study found that although young English-speaking teenagers considered writing Chinese characters more difficult than recognizing them, they thought it was worth spending time learning to write.…”

Section: Learner Belief About L2 Chinese Character Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regarding character learning strategies, learners agreed that handwriting and using radicals were effective strategies for memorizing characters. However, Yang (2018) only investigated five strategies and did not further explore the relationship between learners' beliefs and strategy use in Chinese character learning. The questions of whether and how learners' beliefs about Chinese character learning influence their learning strategies remain unanswered.…”

Section: Learner Belief About L2 Chinese Character Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the past two decades, there has been an increase in the teaching and learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) both within and outside China (Ma et al, 2017). Chinese characters, which play a vital role in CFL teaching and learning, are considered the most challenging part of learning the Chinese language Yang, 2018). On the one hand, whereas most languages (including English and Arabic) use sound-based writing systems, Chinese uses a meaning-based writing system (Cook and Bassetti, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling the relationships among teacher instruction, learner belief, and learning strategies in Chinese character learning by alphabetic learners

Yu,

Chan

2023

Journal of Chinese Writing Systems

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With the increasing research on self-regulated learning of English as a foreign language, scant attention has been devoted to investigating Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). To partially address this issue, we investigated self-regulated Chinese character learning by alphabetic learners. Using structural equation modeling, we constructed a model of the relationship among teachers’ instructions, learners’ beliefs, and learning strategies based on a survey of 202 CFL learners. The model indicated that teachers’ instructions directly and positively affect learners’ beliefs and learning strategies. However, learners’ beliefs cannot predict what strategies they adopt in character learning. The findings of this study shed light on the effective teaching of Chinese characters to CFL learners. We suggest that in addition to shape-related and pronunciation-related instructions, CFL learners should be provided with more meaning-related instructions and that Chinese character typing should be introduced to facilitate the learners’ use of effective strategies in self-regulated character learning.

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“…Chinese, the only existing pictographic language in the modern world, is one of the most difficult languages to learn [16], [17]. There are more than 200,000 commonly used words in Chinese that are composed of 5,000 characters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese Lexical Simplification

Qiang¹,

Lu²,

Li³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Lexical simplification has attracted much attention in many languages, which is the process of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Although the richness of vocabulary in Chinese makes the text very difficult to read for children and non-native speakers, there is no research work for Chinese lexical simplification (CLS) task. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we manually create the first benchmark dataset for CLS, which can be used for evaluating the lexical simplification systems automatically. In order to acquire more thorough comparison, we present five different types of methods as baselines to generate substitute candidates for the complex word that include synonym-based approach, word embedding-based approach, pretrained language model-based approach, sememe-based approach, and a hybrid approach. Finally, we design the experimental evaluation of these baselines and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. To our best knowledge, this is the first study for CLS task.

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What makes learning Chinese characters difficult? The voice of students from English secondary schools

Cited by 14 publications

References 26 publications

Chinese Language in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Recommendations

Chinese Language in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Recommendations

Modeling the relationships among teacher instruction, learner belief, and learning strategies in Chinese character learning by alphabetic learners

Chinese Lexical Simplification

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