Explicit instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology ...

Reading and Writing (2006) 19:457–487 DOI 10.1007/s11145-006-9003-4

Ó Springer 2006

Explicit instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology helps Chinese children learn to write characters JEROME L. PACKARD1, XI CHEN2, WENLING LI1, XINCHUN WU3, JANET S. GAFFNEY1, HONG LI3 and RICHARD C. ANDERSON1 1

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; 2University of Toronto, ON, Toronto, Canada; 3Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

Abstract. Previous research in alphabetic languages had shown that children learning to write are sensitive to morphological information, and that it serves as a resource that they draw upon as they acquire writing skills. In Chinese as well, sensitivity to morphological and orthographic information had been found to predict children’s ability to read characters. The present study investigated whether raising children’s awareness of the morphemic and orthographic structure of Chinese words would lead to beneficial results in their learning to write Chinese. An experimental group of 144 first graders from two primary schools in Beijing, China were given instruction designed to increase their knowledge of the orthographic and morphological structure of Chinese words. After two semesters, the experimental group’s ability to copy Chinese characters and to write them from memory were both found to be significantly better than a control group. Theoretical implications are discussed, including how writing benefits from the types of linguistic knowledge that underlie lexical storage and retrieval in reading and speech. Educational implications are also discussed, such as how drawing children’s attention to the morphemic components of Chinese words and the systematic features of Chinese orthography provides them with multiple sources of information they may utilize in learning to write. Key words: Chinese, Instruction, Morphological awareness, Morphology, Orthographic structure, Writing

Introduction Studies of writing acquisition have shown that children do not simply rely on rote memory when they acquire writing skills, but rather learn to take advantage of different kinds of systematic information contained in writing systems. One such type of information is morphological knowledge, that is, knowledge of the morphemic structure of words. Knowledge about morphemic structure can aid children in learning to write because

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the properties of writing systems are often closely related to morphological relationships within the languages they represent. For example, the knowledge that the spoken forms horse and horses are morphologically related (i.e., represent the morphological alternation between singular and plural marking) is relevant to the fact that the correct spelling of the base form is 1 with a ‘silent e’ rather than *. Research in English and other alphabetic languages has shown that children learning to write are sensitive to such morphological information, and that it serves as a resource that they use as they acquire writing skills. For example, Waters, Bruck, and Malus-Abramowitz (1988) compared children’s spelling of ‘‘morphologic words’’ with ‘‘opaque words’’, with the former containing orthographic information that is analogous to their corresponding derivatives (e.g. musical) and the latter containing rare orthographic patterns (e.g. laughter). The authors found that children spelled morphologic words more easily than opaque words, suggesting that children can use derivational relations in spelling. Similar findings are also reported in the spelling of French words among Frenchspeaking children (Leybaert & Alegria, 1995; Leybaert & Content, 1995; Senechal, 2000). For example, by comparing the spelling of ‘‘morphological words’’ and ‘‘deep words’’, Senechal showed that French children in the second and fourth grade were able to represent morphological information in their spelling. Treiman and Cassar (1996) found that children are able to use morphological knowledge in their spelling as early as the first grade, and Nunes, Bryant, and Bindman (1997) found that this morphological effect on children learning how to spell develops over time in conjunction with the development of their morphological awareness. Nunes, Bryant, and Olsson (2003) compared the effects of 4 types of metalinguistic interventions on the reading and spelling of 7- and 8-year olds. Children were randomly assigned to morphology or phonology training groups with or without writing components. The most notable result is that only the children in the morphology conditions significantly outperformed the control group in using morphological rules (derivational morphemes and stems) in spelling. Morphological knowledge might be expected to be even more critical to the acquisition of writing in Chinese than it is in the alphabetic studies referred to above, because of the closer relationship between morphemes and basic orthography units (i.e., characters) in Chinese. In alphabetic systems, phonemic awareness is important in learning to read (e.g., Mann, 1984, 1993; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Cunningham, 1990; Treiman, 1991; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991), because children must learn that letters usually map onto phonemes, which

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requires a degree of phonemic awareness. In Chinese, characters map directly onto individual morphemes, and so one might expect that morphological awareness would be especially critical for children learning to read Chinese. Previous studies have demonstrated that this is indeed the case. In a study of first- and fourth-grade students, Li, Anderson, Nagy, and Zhang (2002) found that both phonological and morphological awareness were important in learning to read Chinese, but that morphological awareness was more important at both grade levels. Nagy, Kuo-Kealoha, Wu, Li, Anderson, and Chen (2002) found that morphological awareness instruction increased subjects’ performance on tasks that emphasize character-level knowledge in both first- and fourth-grade students2. Finally, McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat, and Wagner (2003) found that oral language tasks designed to measure children’s awareness of the morphemic structure of Chinese words predicted children’s Chinese character reading ability in both kindergarten and second grade students. In Chinese, the most direct counterpart to the type of morphological knowledge discussed in the alphabetic studies referred to above is the knowledge of how a single morpheme (character3) with a given meaning appears in different complex (multimorpheme) words that have related meanings. For example, the morpheme huo ‘fire’ appears both in the word huo-chai fire-wood ‘match’ and in the word huo-ba fire-handle ‘torch’. The Chinese words for ‘match’ and ‘torch’ therefore are semantically related in a way that is reflected in their shared morpheme huo ‘fire’. In addition to the type of word morphemic knowledge structure referred to directly above, there is an additional kind of systematic structural knowledge in Chinese that is relevant for children learning to read and write, that is, knowledge of the structure of Chinese character orthography. Despite its well-known complexity, the Chinese written language is highly systematic in its structure. For example, phonological and semantic information is predictably and systematically positioned within the majority of Chinese characters. This systematicity, which we will outline in detail in the sections to follow, represents a valuable source of information that children may exploit in learning to write. Knowledge of the systematic properties of Chinese orthography – which has elsewhere (e.g., Nagy et al., 2002, p. 67) been termed character morphology but will here be termed orthographic structure – is different from knowledge of the morphological structure of words, which we will here term word morphology. Orthographic structure knowledge refers to knowledge that semantic and phonetic radicals are located in specific places in Chinese characters, the details of which to be explained in the following sections. Word morphology refers to knowledge of how a single

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morpheme with a given meaning may appear in different complex words that have related meanings, as in the example using ‘match’ and ‘torch’ referred to above. These two types of knowledge are conceptually related, because both directly pertain to the beginning reader’s acquisition and manipulation of semantic information. In addition, as noted in Taft, Liu, and Zhu (1998) and Packard (2002), these two concepts are even more closely related, because the meaning contained in the semantic radicals of phonetic compound characters (see following sections) is, in general, the meaning common to most of the morphemes those characters represent. As Taft et al. (1998) suggest, the semantic radicals in Chinese characters share many of the characteristics of the ‘morpheme’ construct, because most are associated with a particular meaning. This theory is made explicit in Taft et al. (1998) and Taft (in press) by the fact that semantic radicals and the shared semantic values of semantically similar characters have exactly the same representation in Taft’s Multilevel InteractiveActivation Framework (i.e., Taft’s ‘lemma’). Given that orthographic structure (including semantic) information is a highly salient, intrinsic feature of Chinese writing, and that morphological awareness has been shown to be relevant to children learning to read and write in Western, alphabetic languages and relevant to children’s reading ability in Chinese, it is reasonable to hypothesize that knowledge of both word morphology and orthographic structure would be relevant to children learning to write Chinese. The intent of the present study, therefore, was to determine the effect that enhancing knowledge of both word morphology and orthographic structure would have on Chinese children learning to write.

The Chinese writing system The Chinese language employs one of the most complex orthographic systems in the world, a fact that has direct implications for Chinese children learning to write. In the first place, the sheer number of characters to be learned by the child is truly daunting: of the more than 6,000 characters estimated to be in daily use by the literate adult (Dictionary of Chinese Character Information, 1988), it has been estimated that a knowledge of 3,500 is required for basic literacy, that is, to understand written materials such as newspapers or simple novels (DeFrancis, 1984). In addition, the basic unit of writing is the stroke, with each character consisting of as many as thirty-two strokes (Modern Chinese Dictionary, 1988), with a mean number of about eight strokes per character (Dictionary of Chinese Character Information, 1988). These strokes form

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hundreds of components, or recurrent partials (Fu, 1994), each of which must be correctly positioned for proper production of the character (A discussion of the distinction between components and radicals follows). A child learning to write must remember the relative position of these components, and the relative order of the strokes used to form them. Also, since the number of strokes that must fit into the square shape that defines the character is relatively high, the result is a high degree of visual complexity. In writing, this visual complexity translates into a significant hand-eye motor coordination challenge, because of the need to fit relatively large numbers of strokes into a relatively small space. Learning to write Chinese is further complicated by the fact that Chinese orthography is one of the most phonologically opaque writing systems in the world. A character often contains a graphic element – the phonetic radical (definition follows) – that contributes information about pronunciation. But since there are over 800 phonetic radicals (DeFrancis, 1984), and because the radicals represent phonetic information in sometimes irregular and inconsistent fashion (see footnote 5), the information provided by the phonetic radicals is difficult for learners to adduce and is often unreliable.

Systematic information in Chinese characters For all their complexity, the majority of Chinese characters (around 82%, Zhou, 1978) do represent sound and meaning in a highly systematic fashion. In this class of characters – termed phonetic compounds – pronunciation information occurs in the phonetic radical, which is usually located on the right side of a character, and meaning information is present in the semantic radical, which is usually located on the left. As seen in Figure 1, simple characters are not divided into phonetic and semantic radicals, and so the pronunciation and meaning of the character are not represented separately. The first simple character, for example, is pronounced ‘qing’4 and means ‘blue’, and the second is pronounced ‘ri’ and means ‘sun’. For both of these simple characters, the sound and the meaning are taken to be properties of the entire character. In the three phonetic compound characters displayed in Figure 2, on the other hand, pronunciation information is represented by the phonetic radical on the right, and meaning information is represented by the semantic radical on the left5. The first phonetic compound character in Figure 2, for example, has the three-stroke ‘water’ semantic radical on the left-hand side and the phonetic radical ‘qing’ on the right (which happens to serve as the simple character for ‘blue’ in Figure 1), and so the entire

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Simple characters

Pronunciation - qing

Pronunciation - ri

Meaning - 'blue'

Meaning - 'sun'

Figure 1. Simple characters.

Phonetic compound characters

Character pronunciation - qing

Character pronunciation - qing

Character pronunciation - qing

Semantic radical meaning -

Semantic radical meaning -

Semantic radical meaning -

'water'

'sun'

'speak'

Character meaning - 'clear'

Character meaning - 'clear

Character meaning - 'request'

sky'

Figure 2. Phonetic compound characters.

character is pronounced ‘qing’ (following the phonetic radical) and means ‘clear’ (as implied by the ‘water’ semantic radical). The second phonetic compound character also gets its pronunciation ‘qing’ from the phonetic radical on the right, and has the semantic radical for ‘sun’ on the left, giving a clue to the entire character’s meaning of ‘cloudless sky’. The third phonetic compound character is pronounced ‘qing’ following the phonetic

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radical, and means ‘to request’ following the ‘speech’ semantic radical on the left.

Traditional reading and writing instruction in China Reading and writing instruction in the traditional Chinese classroom generally does not take full advantage of the systematicity inherent in Chinese character orthography. Traditional instruction relies heavily on rote memorization, generally accomplished for reading by having children memorize characters as a paired-associate learning task, and for writing by having children copy characters until they have internalized their production as a motor skill. Teachers typically demonstrate how each character is constructed stroke-by-stroke on the blackboard, with students performing a repetitive copying task on worksheets at their desks. Teachers also often demonstrate how the characters are written by tracing the individual strokes with hand movements in the air, with students imitating the teacher’s movements in the air at their seats. Although teachers sometimes draw attention to the more common semantic radicals that will enable children to, for example, look up characters in the dictionary, for the most part the students are not given explicit instruction on how the characters may be analyzed into semantic and phonetic radicals, and so generally receive little explicit instruction on orthographic structure (Wu, Li, & Anderson, 1999). Schoolchildren in China are taught pinyin phonetic orthography during first 10 weeks of first grade. Pinyin is written above all of the characters in the first and second grade textbooks as an aid to character pronunciation, and is used only with unfamiliar characters beginning in the third grade (Wu et al., 1999).

Previous research on Chinese children learning to read Previous studies on Chinese children learning to read (Anderson, Li, Ku, Shu, & Wu, 2002; Chen, Shu, Wu, & Anderson, 2003; Nagy et al., 2002; Shu & Anderson, 1997, 1998; Shu, Anderson, & Wu, 2000) have sought to determine whether orthographic structure and word morphology could be highlighted in specially-designed instructional interventions, with the objective being to see if such instruction would help children better learn to read. These studies found that, in general, children who receive the specialized instruction indeed perform better on various measures of reading than control groups who do not receive such instruction.

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Since children learning to read Chinese have been found to benefit from explicit, cognitive instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology in previous reading studies, the issue we sought to address in the present study was the effect such instruction would have on children learning to write. In what follows we present the results of an orthographic structure and word morphology instructional intervention on children’s ability to write Chinese characters.

Method Participants The subjects of our study were 144 first graders from two primary schools in Beijing, China. The two schools were selected from 10 schools based on performance on an achievement test and homogeneity of family background. Two classes were selected from each of the two schools, with one class from each school assigned to the experimental condition and the other assigned to the control condition. In total, 73 children (20 male and 18 female from school one, 18 male and 17 female from school two) received the interventional instruction and 71 children (18 male and 19 female from school one, 18 male and 16 female from school two) served as controls. Since the standard teaching guide was followed for both experimental and control classes in the intervention, no more time was allotted to character reading and writing in the experimental than in the control classes: the only difference was the teaching method used when new characters were taught. As with other schools following the national pinyin instruction policy (Wu, Li, & Anderson, 1999), pinyin orthography was taught during the first ten weeks of the fall semester in both the experimental and control classes.

Instruction in orthographic structure One goal of the instructional intervention was to have students in the experimental group logically analyze and become cognitively aware of why a character had a given semantic or phonetic radical (which may be termed orthographic structure awareness), rather than just helping them to learn how to read the character as a relatively unanalyzed paired-associate memorization task. This intervention training emphasized the composition of phonetic compound characters by drawing students’ attention to the phonetic and semantic radicals. For all new characters,

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the teacher helped students gain insights into their structure and their use in forming new characters, as well as providing reminders commonly used in traditional instruction, such as easily made mistakes on certain strokes, and incorrect characters often confused with target characters. New phonetic compound characters were introduced with multiple examples and detailed questions that required analysis of the character into its semantic and phonetic radicals. Examples of the types of questions asked are: Where is the semantic radical? What does it mean? Which part of the character provides the pronunciation? What is the pronunciation of that part? What is the pronunciation of the whole character? What does it mean? How do the meaning and pronunciation of the character come from the phonetic part and the semantic part? What other characters do you know that have this semantic radical? What other characters do you know that have this phonetic radical? What do those characters mean? How are they pronounced? Instruction in word morphology Another goal of the intervention training was to have students be aware of how a given character (i.e., morpheme) contributes to the meaning of a multi-morpheme word (morphological awareness), rather than just having them simply memorize, as an unanalyzed whole, the word in which the morpheme appears. This approach was designed to draw students’ attention to the identities of the single morphemes that make up twomorpheme words, and to the variety of additional two-morpheme words that can be formed using those single morphemes. The daily lessons therefore included such questions as: What does this character mean? What words in this lesson include this character? What do those words mean? What is the connection between this character and those words? Do you know any other words that use this character? What do those words mean? What is the connection between this character and those words? The goal of both orthographic structure and word morphology training was not only to help students in applying those analytical techniques to the characters and words in their daily lessons, but also to encourage students to apply such knowledge strategically as they learned new characters and words. Intervention teacher training The experimental group teachers were explicitly trained in the use of orthographic structure and word morphology instructional techniques by

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a training team headed by one of the study authors (Wu) during two modes of training, summer training and ongoing training. Summer training consisted of an intensive 10-day-period during the summer preceding the intervention, during which time experimental group teachers were introduced to the nature of Chinese orthographic structure and word morphology, followed by an introduction to teaching methods that exploited the orthographic structure and word morphology information. The training team provided the teachers with a sample lesson for each new character in the first five lessons in the first grade using the interventional methodologies. The teachers were shown videotapes of pilot lessons and were asked to prepare their own sample lessons. The teachers were given feedback on their lesson plans, and participated in a seminar to exchange ideas and receive advice on the upcoming instructional intervention. Ongoing teacher training was offered concurrent with the intervention, and consisted of weekly meetings of the teachers and the training team during which time the instruction offered over the previous week and the lessons to be presented over the following week were discussed. Classes taught by experimental group teachers were also observed and critiqued by members of the training team 2–4 times a week, and model lessons taught by training team members were also observed by experimental group teachers.

Test materials and procedure Tasks designed to provide measures of character writing ability, metalinguistic awareness (i.e., morphological awareness and phonological awareness) and general IQ were administered to control and experimental groups in the fall, before the instructional intervention, and in the spring, after the instructional intervention. These tasks are described below. The tasks Copy Characters and Write Characters were designed specifically to measure children’s Chinese character writing ability. In the Copy Characters task, 25 characters (mostly phonetic compounds; see list of characters in Appendix 1) were presented on the blackboard at the front of the classroom. Children were asked to copy down as many characters as possible from that list of 25 characters on their answer sheets in two minutes. In the Write Characters task, children were asked to write down from memory as many characters as possible in 5 minutes. Three tasks measuring morphological awareness were given to children before and after the intervention. The tasks Morpheme Discrimination and Morpheme Transfer examined children’s ability to

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analyze two-morpheme spoken words into morphemes and infer the meaning of an unfamiliar morpheme from a familiar word. The Morpheme Selection task examined children’s ability to use the information in the semantic radical of a character to determine which morpheme a given character represents. Morpheme Discrimination was administered to children individually. Morpheme Transfer and Morpheme Selection were administered to the whole class simultaneously. In the Morpheme Discrimination task, the child was orally presented four two-morpheme (–character) words that were familiar from oral language. The four words shared one syllable in common, but the common syllable in one of the words represented a different morpheme (character) from the other three. Children were asked to find the ‘‘odd’’ word. For example, /jian4/ is the common syllable in the words / jian4she4/ (construction), /jian4kang1/ (healthy), /jian4zhuang4/ (strong), and /jian4mei3/ (vigorous and graceful). The response / jian4she4/ (construction) is the correct answer because the syllable /jian4/ in the word jian4she4 represents a different morpheme (i.e., ‘build’) from the syllable /jian4/ in the other three words (‘healthy’). This would be analogous to asking an English-speaking child to point out in an oral task that the syllable pronounced /rait/ in the word ‘rightful’ represents a different morpheme from the same syllable /rait/ in the words ‘rightward’ or ‘rightmost’ in English. In the Morpheme Transfer task, the experimenter explained the meanings of two unfamiliar homophone characters appearing in words familiar from oral language. Then the experimenter read a test word, and asked the children to judge which of the two characters should be used in the test word. For example, the experimenter presented a card displaying a character and said, ‘‘Look, this is /xin1 (heart), the /xin1 that occurs in the word /xin1zang4/ (heart, as a body organ)’’. Then the experimenter displayed another character and said, ‘‘Look, this is /xin1/ (new), the /xin1/ that occurs in the word /xin1wen2/ (news)’’. Finally, the experimenter presented the word /xin1nian2/ (new year) orally and asked children to circle which of the two characters printed on an answer sheet ( /xin1/ and /xin1/) should be used in this word. The correct answer is /xin1/, because it means ‘new’. In the Morpheme Selection task, the experimenter read a sentence aloud twice. The sentence was printed on the answer sheet, except for a blank where one character was missing. The children’s task was to choose the character from among four choices that properly filled in the blank. All of the characters were unfamiliar to children but they had a hint of the meaning of the best choice from the semantic radical on the left-hand side of the character. For instance, the four choices for the sentence

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‘‘ / A piece of (gauze) cloth was twined around Xiao Ming’s arm.’’ were (1) /sha1/ (sand) (2) /sha1/ (emery) (3) /sha1/ (nutgrass) (4) /sha1/ (gauze). The correct answer is the fourth choice ( /sha1/; gauze) because the character contains the known semantic radical /silk/fabric on the left-hand side of the character, and gauze is a kind of fabric. Three phonological awareness tasks were also given to children before and after the intervention. The Syllable Reversal, Onset Deletion, and Tone Judgment tasks measured children’s syllable, onset-rime, and tone awareness respectively. All the phonological awareness tasks were administered individually. In the Syllable Reversal task, children were asked to reverse syllables in two-, three- and four-syllable words presented to them orally. For instance, /qiao3ke4li4/ ‘chocolate’ would be pronounced /li4ke4qiao3/ if the syllables are reversed. In the Onset Deletion task, children were asked to delete the onset of a syllable orally presented by the experimenter. For example, deleting the onset /b/ from the syllable /bai3/ leaves /ai3/. In the Tone Judgment task, children were asked to judge whether a pair of syllables had the same or a different tone. For example, /fang1/ and /chang2/ have different tones whereas /lian3/ and /hai3/ have the same tone. Children’s non-verbal IQ was evaluated using a standardized Chinese version of Raven’s progressive matrices (Zhang & Wang, 1985), which was converted into a paper-pencil task and administered to an entire class simultaneously.

Results Pre- and post-intervention means and standard deviations for all subjects on the morphological and phonological awareness measures are presented in Table 1. Children improved on all the measures after one year of schooling regardless of experimental condition. The experimental group and the control group did not differ significantly in any of the preintervention measures of morphological or phonological awareness, indicating that the two groups were comparable at the beginning of the intervention. At the end of the intervention, children in the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group on two out of three morphological awareness measures: Morpheme Transfer and Morpheme Selection (F (1, 122)=17.04, P