Listening for Learning the Characters

Along similar lines, the approach of 谷錦屏 Gu in 天津 Tianjin is to let pre-school children listen to the recitation of texts everyday as a preparation for later actual learning (i.e., 聽讀識字(Listening for learning the characters)).

Each time, the teachers either read the texts or play audiotapes to the preschoolers for 20 minutes. After becoming familiar with the texts, the preschoolers are given the texts in print, from which they can try to connect the characters to the sounds in their memory. The purpose here is also to develop an affective appreciation toward the act of reading before the start of formal learning in primary schools. By so doing, in one kindergarten, 70% to 80% of the preschoolers could recognize more than 500 characters upon graduation.

The above proposals are similar in that there was an emphasis on teaching the characters in meaningful contexts. However, one of the problems of this extensive approach is that teachers are not given any clear and explicit guideline to teach the characters. As such, when some teachers are not well trained with linguistic knowledge about the characters (e.g., in 文字學 Wen Zi Xue(The study of Chinese characters)), they have no choice but to teach children to rote memorize the characters. Moreover, since characters sharing certain linguistic features are learned in different places, the children’s understanding of these features cannot be consolidated in an organized manner. Furthermore, it is also commonly reported that the children were confused by the homophonous characters.

Over a few decades, educators have been divided in the debate over which is the best way to teach the characters. On the one hand, intensive approaches emphasize an explicit teaching of the general linguistic features of the characters, which children no matter how must realize in order to learn the thousands of the characters. On the other hand, extensive approaches are concerned about learning the characters in meaningful contexts, which importantly paves the way for children to become able to read and write the characters in a useful manner. However, perhaps, the two approaches may not be necessarily viewed as incompatible.

As a matter of fact, those teachers who have adopted an intensive approach do give examples of relevant words and sentences to illustrate the characters in use (i.e., putting the characters in context). Likewise, in an extensive approach, teaching general knowledge of the characters such as the rules of stroke order and the compositions of the characters is also what the teachers commonly do. Thus, intensive and extensive approaches work well together in practice.