Integrated Approach

Adopting an integrated approach, 鄢文俊 Yan and 盧正體 Lu in 四川井研 Jingyan, Sichuan used meaningful texts in which a family of characters with certain shared features are used (i.e., 字族文 texts of a family of characters).

In each piece of texts, a parent character such as 青([qīng], blue or green) was chosen for generating a list of dependent characters such as 清([qīng], clear), 晴([qíng], sunny), 蜻([qīng], dragonfly), 睛([jīng], eye), 情([qíng], feeling) and 請([qǐng] to invite).All these characters were then put together into a meaningful text. For example,

    小青蛙

河水清清天氣晴，

小小青蛙大眼睛。

保護禾苗吃害蟲，

做了不少好事情。

請你保護小青蛙，

它是莊稼好衛兵。

Little frogs

Clear is the river and sunny is the sky.

Little frogs have a pair of big eyes.

Protect young plant and eat the injurious insects.

Having done lots of good things.

Please protect the little frogs.

They are the guard of the crops.

  A text of a family of characters

To teach such a text in the classroom, teachers were recommended to follow the sequence from whole to part, and then back to whole (i.e., 整體→ 部分 → 整體[whole → part → whole]). In other words, children should briefly grasp the meaning of the whole text before they come to analyze the unknown characters in the text, which should at the end be followed by a review of the whole text again (i.e., 文→ 字 → 文(text → character → text)). In the same way, the children were first taught the family of characters as a group; they then looked at the features of each individual character, and finally revisited the whole family again to confirm the common features across the characters (i.e., 字族→ 字 → 字族(family of characters →character → family of characters)). Taught in this way, the children can always bear in mind a sense of the whole even when they must specifically focus on any individual part.

In connection with this, Yan and Lu at first only used simple characters as the parent characters but later realized that the use of compound characters, which have more than one component, is often preferred. For example, if the simple character[silk] was used as a parent, the characters織([zhī], to knit),縫([féng], to sew), 邏([luó], logic) and 鑼([luó], gong) would all belong to the same family. But the function of the in these characters was rather haphazard, namely, serving as a semantic component in the first two characters but not in the latter two. Thus, instead of this, the compound character 羅([luó], to catch) was eventually used as a parent. In so doing, the family of characters 邏([luó], logic), 蘿([luó], pineapple), 籮([luó], basket) and 鑼([luó], gong) will all have the 羅([luó], to catch) consistently function as a phonetic component.

As an evaluation of this approach, one class of children in a school was taught a total of 2498 characters in two years and was then asked to write 300 characters in dictation. The children were found to be able to recognize 2428 of the characters (i.e.,97.1%) and to write 283 of the characters (i.e., 94.3%). The average final score of the class in the school was 98.8 as compared to 70.7 of another class as control.

However, there are certain weaknesses in this integrated approach. One is obviously the limited availability of this kind of specially designed texts. Different from this, using an extensive approach, teachers can choose from a much vast variety of texts, including classics of proved value. Moreover, occasionally, the derived rather than the original meanings of some characters must be used in order to fit into the meaning of the overall text. One example is the 情([qíng], feeling) as in 事情([shì qíng], matter) above, where the meaning of “matter” has nothing to do with that of the semantic component 心([xīn], feeling). If instead teachers teach the characters independently, as in an intensive approach, they can talk about the original meaning “feeling” of the character 情([qíng], feeling), where the reason why the semantic component 心([xīn], feeling) is used can be clearly seen.

Another integrated approach is that of Tse 謝錫金 in Hong Kong, who suggests to use a mix of various approaches to more effectively teach the characters.