What Visibilising Pedagogical Approaches do the Chinese as a Foreign Language (cfl) Teachers Adopt in the Teaching of Chinese Characters?

Abstract

Abstract Chinese can be considered as one of the more challenging languages to learn for many non-native learners. Its complicated visual script, the Chinese characters, demands that teachers be proficient in utilizing diverse visual pedagogical approaches, coupled with different digital visual tools, to enhance their teaching effectiveness. Adopting a descriptive qualitative analysis method, interview transcripts from fourteen cfl teachers were examined. There were five online teachers, four university teachers and five pre-service teachers. The findings revealed that: 1) all the teachers use various visual pedagogical approaches, such as pictures, videos, Chinese character digital image files, Chinese character studying applications, and websites, to enhance the effectiveness of Chinese character learning, as well as motivate and engage learners; 2) teachers choose different pedagogical approaches to help students visualise characters as a whole unit or as several separate radical components; 3) the use of Pinyin to input characters on digital devices has been widely taught in class; and 4) online teachers, and some pre-service teachers, have replaced traditional handwriting methods with digital character input methods, whereas university teachers have not made this shift. The ways in which these perspectives relate to the form of Chinese characters and developing teaching practices are discussed.