The Role of Structure Awareness in Learning Chinese Script

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between children's structure awareness of the Chinese script and their reading attainment. The investigation of the structure awareness was based upon a learning paradigm by Tsai, [1]. The measure of children's reading ability was based both upon teachers' grades and on standardized reading tests used in Taiwan. Two research questions were asked: (1) Do children use the structure of ideophonetic compounds to learn new characters? (2) Is there a relation between children's structure awareness and their reading achievement? There were 129 children, grades 1-3, from two primary schools in Hualien, participated in the study. It was found that the children learned the characters, which followed the structure of ideophonetic compounds significantly better than the ones which did not. These findings were independent of the response modes, writing or reading experiments, of visual complexity which had been controlled for, and were observed in all three grade levels. This result replicated the previous study [2] and extended to grade 1 children. For the relation between children's structure awareness and their reading attainment, there was no significant correlation, as measured by standardized tests. But there was a significant correlation between grade 1 children's knowledge of the structure and their literacy achievement, as measured by teachers' grades. It was concluded that children must have implicit knowledge of the structure of ideophonetic compounds when learning new characters. For beginners, perhaps this knowledge is helpful to advance to better learners of the Chinese script.