With interlanguage corpora, this study investigates the handwriting errors by Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners from eight countries and three language families (Indo-European languages, Slavic languages, Romance languages), including wrongly written characters and misused characters. The results indicate that the most common mistake among elementary, intermediate and advanced learners is wrongly written characters mainly caused by misuse of components, especially confusion between components and miswriting of components. Besides, stroke errors also matter. The reduction and improper location of strokes, in particular, trouble learners a great deal. As to the misused characters, how to differentiate similar characters is where the difficulties lie. On the whole, from the elementary stage to the intermediate stage, both types of errors decrease significantly, while after the intermediate stage, the decrease of wrongly written characters is more significant than that of the misused characters. Moreover, for advanced learners, the frequencies of these errors are basically the same. The study findings demonstrate that it is crucial for CFL learners to rapidly develop their awareness of orthography between the elementary and intermediate stages. This will last roughly 9 months. Advanced learners are usually well aware of orthography, but their awareness development of the form, pronunciation and meaning is not synchronized. They still make mistakes with details when writing. This research is instructive in the teaching of Chinese character handwriting. It points out the problems and countermeasures of online Chinese character handwriting courses during the pandemic and thus contributes advice to online Chinese character teaching during the long-term future.
This paper analysed a total of 334 English language articles on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language from the Web of Science, during the period from 2001 to 2020. By examining the bibliometric indices of the literature, the analysis found that: 1) The numbers of research publication and citation have gone through slow growth in the first decade and strong growth in the second decade. 2) Highly cited journals are mainly from four categories: educational technology, linguistics, education and psychology. 3) Highly productive authors are mainly from the fields of computing and education, with research interests focused on the use of digital technology to help Chinese language learning. 4) Highly co-cited articles include keywords related to young Chinese learners, foreign language, English context and character learning. 5) The topical trends in Chinese language education research have evolved from an early focus on Chinese writing, learning strategies and cross-cultural language teaching to a mid-term focus on issues such as classroom management and task-based teaching, and further expansion to a more recent focus on the integration of digital technologies and multimodal approaches to teaching and learning. By reviewing these five areas, this study aims to provide a complete picture of the research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language outside mainland China. It is intended to help build bridges of collaboration between researchers and institutions within and outside mainland China by highlighting the researchers who have made significant contributions and the wide range of issues being explored.
With interlanguage corpora, this study investigates the handwriting errors by Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners from eight countries and three language families (Indo-European languages, Slavic languages, Romance languages), including wrongly written characters and misused characters. The results indicate that the most common mistake among elementary, intermediate and advanced learners is wrongly written characters mainly caused by misuse of components, especially confusion between components and miswriting of components. Besides, stroke errors also matter. The reduction and improper location of strokes, in particular, trouble learners a great deal. As to the misused characters, how to differentiate similar characters is where the difficulties lie. On the whole, from the elementary stage to the intermediate stage, both types of errors decrease significantly, while after the intermediate stage, the decrease of wrongly written characters is more significant than that of the misused characters. Moreover, for advanced learners, the frequencies of these errors are basically the same. The study findings demonstrate that it is crucial for CFL learners to rapidly develop their awareness of orthography between the elementary and intermediate stages. This will last roughly 9 months. Advanced learners are usually well aware of orthography, but their awareness development of the form, pronunciation and meaning is not synchronized. They still make mistakes with details when writing. This research is instructive in the teaching of Chinese character handwriting. It points out the problems and countermeasures of online Chinese character handwriting courses during the pandemic and thus contributes advice to online Chinese character teaching during the long-term future.
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