In recent years, Chinese language instruction has been one of the fastest growing fields in second language education in the United States. According to a 1997 survey by the Modern Language Association, the number of U.S. students enrolled in Chinese language classes increased by 42.6% from 1990 to 1997 (Arabic 27%, Spanish 13.5%, Japanese -2.2%, French -24.6%) (
Modern Language Association Newsletter, Volume 31, 1997), a period that coincides with the emergence of China as a key player in the new global economy and the economic successes of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. When asked to rank foreign languages in terms of their importance to international business, the executives of 1,000 largest U.S. companies put Chinese in the first place (400), two to four times higher than other major languages (Spanish 170, French 150, Japanese 145, German 100) (
Family Education Today, September, 1998). Needless to say, knowledge of Chinese language has been, and will continue to be, an invaluable asset for U.S. college graduates in increasingly intensified global competition.
The Chinese Programs at Baruch College and Bryn Mawr College have also experienced extraordinary growth in recent years. In last four years alone, the number of students enrolled in Chinese language courses has more than doubled at both colleges. During the same period of time, two full-time professors and three adjunct professors were hired to respond to the strong demand for more Chinese language courses at Baruch College. The Chinese Program at Bryn Mawr College has also added one full-time professor and two full-time lecturers. Both colleges now have a curriculum that includes four years of formal instruction in Chinese language, literature and culture.
The development of Chinese language student's capability in character writing, however, remains a major problem in the instruction of the language, frustrating many students while they learn the language, and discouraging even more from pursuing studies beyond the first year. This is true at Baruch College and Bryn Mawr College, as well as other higher educational institutions across the country. Given the inherent difficulty of writing Chinese characters, a student can only learn a limited number of Chinese characters within a specific period of time, which inevitably slows his/her progress in achieving overall proficiency in the language. This problem is by far the greatest hindrance not only to students of Chinese as a second language, but also to those heritage Chinese speakers who already possess certain oral/aural proficiency and would otherwise be able to make rapid and comprehensive progress in all language skills if not for their lack of competence in character writing. In a recent survey of Chinese language students at Baruch College, the difficulty of writing Chinese characters was cited as the number one reason when asked why they decided not to pursue Chinese language studies beyond the first year; 91% of the students who dropped Chinese after the first year of study complained about the amount of time dedicated to character writing.
Our project will develop and use specially designed Chinese word-processing software and new teaching methods and techniques to help students develop their character-writing capability at the same rate of development as their other language skills, thereby achieving an accelerated development of their overall proficiency. Without spending time on learning to write Chinese characters with a pen, students will concentrate on developing their oral/aural proficiency and reading ability at a pace much faster than a traditional teaching mode could possibly achieve. Students will rely on computers to reproduce Chinese characters, rather than hand-writing the characters, which has proven to be extremely tedious and highly ineffective at the early stages of the language learning process. They will first key in Chinese romanization or Pinyin according to the pronunciation of a word on a standard keyboard, then, by comparing a small group of homophones in the on-screen input panel, identify and select the intended Chinese character. In this way, students will be able to "write" Chinese characters on the computer screen, as long as they can (a) pronounce a character correctly; and (b) recognize the right character from among a small group of different characters having the same sound. Students therefore will immediately achieve a certain level of capability in character writing through the more easily mastered speaking (Pinyin input) and reading (character recognition) skills, bypassing the difficulty of reproducing hand-written characters entirely. This computerized approach builds on the speaking and reading skills students tend to acquire more rapidly to write characters, whereas the traditional hand-writing method forces students to develop an entirely new skill that takes tremendous amounts of time to perfect, takes valuable time from the development of speaking and comprehension skills, and ultimately discourages students from further study of the language. The "pen-less" approach represents a fundamental departure from traditional practice and will have large, positive impacts not only on individual students, but on Chinese programs at U.S. higher educational institutions as well as secondary educational institutions. Our approach, if widely adopted, will bring about broad changes in the entire field of Chinese language instruction, especially in areas such as textbook compilation, classroom teaching techniques, and curriculum innovation. Finally, these same pedagogical and curricular innovations will be applicable to the fields of Japanese and Korean language instruction, where the same difficulty in learning to write characters exists as well.
In conceiving this project, we have received much support and encouragement from our colleagues and administrators of various levels at both Baruch College and Bryn Mawr College. We have been assured that both colleges will provide necessary academic, technical, and administrative assistance necessary to the success of this project. Both institutions have newly upgraded language labs with state-of-the-art computers and qualified technical supports that will be available to the project during the funded period.
The principle participants of this project include Dr. Theresa Jen, Assistant Professor of Chinese and Chair of East Asian Studies Program of Bryn Mawr College, Dr. Weimin Liu, Software Engineer of Unisys Corporation, Dr. Ping Xu, Assistant Professor of Chinese, Modern Languages Department of Baruch College, and Dr. John Yu, Assistant Professor of Chinese and Director of Chinese Program of Baruch College. Dr. Xu and Dr. Jen will serve as the co-directors of the project. In the past three years, the project participants have collaborated on developing and promoting the idea of "pen-less" Chinese language teaching and learning approach. Our presentations and publications on the issue of character writing in Chinese language instruction and our proposed "pen-less" solution have been highly regarded by leading American and Chinese scholars, most notably, the project consultant, Dr. Victor Mair of University of Pennsylvania, a renowned authority on Chinese language and pioneer in the application of computer in Chinese language, and Professor Shizeng Fang of the State Language Commission in Beijing, a prominent researcher of Chinese language and leading proponent for Chinese language reform, Dr. Perry Link of Princeton University, one of the principal authors of the influential textbook
Chinese Primer, and Dr. Bo-chyuan Yu of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, who has become an active promoter for the "pen-less" approach in Taiwan after hearing our presentation in an international conference in Taipei. Since our approach is proficiency-based and evaluation will largely rely on the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), it should also be noted that Dr. Jen is an experienced OPI tester and one of the only two U.S. OPI trainers certified by ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages). Dr. Yu and Dr. Xu have both completed OPI training programs sponsored by ACTFL and are in the process of becoming certified OPI testers as well. Finally, all the participants have previously served as project directors or associates in other projects funded by private and public sources, such as Mellon Foundation, NEH, Henry Luce Foundation, and FIPSE.
Chinese has been one of the most difficult languages largely because of the seemingly pictographic nature of its written characters. In his ground-breaking book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, John DeFrancis estimates that if learning to speak Chinese is about five percent more difficult than learning to speak French, then learning to read Chinese is about five times as hard as learning to read French (DeFrancis, John:
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984:52). To further extend this estimate to include character hand-writing, one would have to say that learning to write Chinese is about fifty times as hard as learning to write French. The problem with character hand-writing lies in that Chinese characters do not directly reflect their pronunciations. While the word "five" in English directly reflects its pronunciation, following generic spelling rules existing in English language, the same word in Chinese characters, which consists of three straight and one bent lines, does not. In other words, each line or stroke in the Chinese word "five", quite unlike each letter in the English word "five", does not have a phonemic value by itself, and thus the combination of the strokes does not give any clue regarding its pronunciation. As the most influential Chinese linguistist Yuen Ren Chao once said, "The problem of relevance of symbols is much more serious in the case of Chinese writing. Considered as symbols of speech, Chinese writing is rather loosely related to its object. The usual statement is that Chinese writing is not phonetic. It is, but not on the phonemic level; it is on the morphemic level or logographic level. Since each character is a unit symbol, its parts are not expected to symbolize parts of the morphemes, in other words, a character does not spell the phonemes of the word. A certain number of characters do, or rather did, have certain internal features corresponding to features of sounds in the syllable. The so-called phonetic compounds represented sounds fairly closely when they were made, but often are no longer appropriate for modern pronunciations. If English orthography can be said to be 75 percent phonetic, Chinese perhaps can be said to be 25 percent phonetic. After learning the first one-thousand characters, you can guess at the sounds of new characters and be sometimes right. The first thousand characters are the hardest". (Yuen Ren Chao, "Chinese as Symbolic System",
Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics: Essays by Yuen Ren Chao. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976:92).
A Chinese language learner thus appears to be dealing with two entirely different systems, spoken Chinese and written Chinese, with no direct phonemic linkage between them. Even if one can speak a Chinese word, one is still far from being able to read it when it appears as a character. The specific combination of strokes has to be remembered before one can really recognize it as a word with a particular meaning and pronunciation. Moreover, even if one can read a Chinese character, one is still far from being able to write it. Writing such a character means that one has to be able to reproduce all the necessary strokes in their correct order, which is far more difficult than simply recognizing the character on a page. Clearly, while there is little distance between speaking and reading or between reading and writing in English and many other phonetic languages, there is a tremendously large gap in Chinese between speaking, reading, and especially, writing.
It is this gap that accounts for the "Category 4" status of Chinese widely referred to in the field of second language acquisition, which labels the language much more difficult for English-speaking learners than Romance and Germanic languages. According to Walton and Moore, "this complexity [of nonalphabetic writing systems] affects the study of the language in two ways: the writing system itself takes longer to master than the writing systems of Category 1-3 languages do; and mastery of reading and writing takes so much time away from study of the oral language that the entire language learning process is slowed significantly (Walton, Ronald and Sarah Moore:
Introducing Chinese into High Schools: The Dodge Initiative. NFLC Monograph Series. Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Language Center, 1992:128).
Learning to hand-write Chinese characters is no doubt the greatest difficulty facing all students of Chinese, and beginning students in particular. Until now, there has been no way to remove this obstacle other than asking students to labor for hours on end practicing character hand-writing. The precious time devoted to character hand-writing takes away classroom time that would be far better spent on developing students' speaking and reading skills. Even with substantial time devoted to character-writing, the results are still often extremely unsatisfactory, with a large number of errors in character production, all of which significantly slows down the entire language acquisition process. Standard instructional methods in use at U.S. institutions of higher education introduce beginning students of Chinese to two entirely different systems at once, the romanization system and Chinese characters proper, whose reproduction entails hours and hours of tedious practice. If we equate learning a Chinese romanization system to the learning of a phonetic language, then learning Chinese means that the students have to accept some extra work in comparison with learning most other languages. What is worse, the "extra" work is both tedious and frustrating.
The various approaches to Chinese language instruction currently in use at U.S. institutions find different means to come to terms with this frustration. Some approaches simply avoid teaching students any Chinese characters at all for the entire first year or two, and rely entirely on one or another form of romanization in order to achieve a faster development of student's speaking and listening skills. Unfortunately, this approach at best yields only an incomplete Chinese language learning experience, since it is Chinese characters, not the romanized schemes, that are used in written communication in all Chinese-speaking communities. Moreover, while this approach may temporarily postpone the difficulties of writing Chinese characters by hand, it does not really "resolve" any of the inherent problems of character hand-writing, because the characters eventually will have to be introduced at some point in the learning process; the problem is deferred rather than resolved. The same drawback also exists in a few of the so-called "two-track" programs offered in this country, which divides instruction of Chinese language into two basic "tracks," one focused on developing oral/aural skills without any instruction of Chinese characters, the other devoted to the development of reading and writing in Chinese characters alone. While the separation of the two "tracks" may indeed meet some students' special needs, in either case it can provide only an incomplete Chinese language learning experience, except when a student takes both at the same time, where the slower second "track" would still inevitably interfere with the first.
Other approaches emphasize the unity of all aspects of Chinese language learning, though they disagree among themselves over the appropriate pace of character acquisition. For instance, the popular textbook,
Practical Chinese Reader, adopting a most traditional "easy but slow" approach, introduces the four skills immediately and in unison. Thus the sentences, and therefore the grammatical items, must remain rather simple to match the process of character acquisition. The energy expended on characters diminishes the time available for oral-aural skill development, which is limited to the number of Chinese characters a student can assimilate in a given lesson. As a result, the students using this textbook have a low overall proficiency, showing that through equal emphasis of all four skills none is well developed.
On the other hand, the more demanding textbook
Chinese Primer currently in use at many colleges prefers to set a "difficult but fast" pace (Ch'en, Ta-tuan et al.:
Chinese Primer: Lessons. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994:xi). Chen based his
Chinese Primer on the philosophy that a college student's already developed cognitive abilities make him/her different from the elementary school student. The Chinese language texts used in Chinese elementary schools, not matched with the intellectual and emotional levels of the college student, are not appropriate instructional materials for college use. Ch'en's text, created for the college-level student, emphasizes the oral-aural skills so that within one year all major grammatical points and sentence patterns are covered. The introduction of characters, as a result, has to be secondary, as the number of Chinese characters appearing in each lesson is simply too large to be tackled by any college student within a limited time frame. The students therefore are asked to learn only few characters a day, fewer than what they can speak and comprehend with the help of a romanization system, with the hope that one day their ability of hand-writing Chinese characters will catch up with the development of their skills in other aspects. As a result, the ability of reading and writing Chinese characters almost always lags behind speaking and listening comprehension, the well-documented "temporary lag in character-learning" (Ch'en, 1994:xi).
While the editors of the
Chinese Primer are absolutely right to point out that the "easy but slow" approach unnecessarily slows down the entire learning process, they themselves fail to account for the "temporary lag in character-learning" retained by the
Chinese Primer. This "temporary lag," again, does nothing to resolve the basic problems entailed by hand-writing Chinese characters, since students are still required to hand-write all the characters. Moreover, students using the
Chinese Primer are often quite confused by the unbalanced development of their linguistic skills this "temporary lag" causes. The fundamental problem, again, lies in the requirement of hand-writing Chinese characters.
Clearly, the above three approaches to Chinese language teaching exhaust the logical possibilities of teaching character hand-writing in Chinese language instruction. On one end of the spectrum is the approach that simply avoids Chinese characters altogether. On the other end is the approach that takes care of everything, including speaking, listening, reading and writing in characters at once. The approach represented by the
Chinese Primer is actually a sensible compromise in this respect, since it does attempt to instruct character writing while maintaining a relatively faster pace of instruction overall. However, none of these approaches has resolved the basic problems posed by hand-writing Chinese characters in a satisfactory way. Character writing in Chinese is so far removed from the spoken language that as long as there is a requirement of hand-writing Chinese characters, one has to live with the problem no matter what approach is adopted. In order to find out the degree to which students can write what they can speak and read, we have conducted a preliminary investigation at Bryn Mawr College, where the
Chinese Primer is used. The results we have obtained from the investigation are astounding: after the first year of study, the students surveyed can write only 39% of what they can speak and read correctly, even after they have practiced extensively in hand-writing. Among the characters that they are unable to produce or produce correctly, about half are partially correct Chinese characters (44%), which are either the characters with an incorrect radical, or those that are not the intended characters but have the same pronunciation as the intended ones.
The millennium-old gap in Chinese between speaking, reading, and writing has been considerably narrowed in recent years, thanks to the increased use of computers and Chinese word-processing software. With Chinese word-processing software, one is able to "write" Chinese characters on the computer screen, as long as one can complete the following two actions: (1) input on regular keyboard the romanized letters representing the sound of a Chinese character; and (2) recognize the intended character from among a small group of different characters with the same sound. This technological development has profound pedagogical implications. To illustrate, let us return to the example given earlier, the Chinese word for "five," or "wu" in Pinyin. By inputting "wu" on a standard keyboard, the software brings up a set of Chinese characters for words with the same sound. Rather than reproduce the character by hand, a student just needs to select the correct character from a limited range of choices (those programs which provide means to indicate tone in the Pinyin input limit potential choices even further). This software eliminates the necessity to reproduce Chinese characters by hand and allows students to learn to write by building on the skills they have traditionally acquired far more readily: the ability to speak and the ability to read. The substantial difficulties entailed in "drawing" the proper strokes that constitute a correct Chinese written character are left to the "hands" of the computer. For the first time in history, Chinese characters, by means of Pinyin, now have a direct relation to their phonetic characteristics.
The current practice at some educational institutions in this country introduces students to Chinese word-processing software only at the advanced level for the sole purpose of word-processing, after semesters of tedious labor learning to hand-write Chinese characters. Our approach, however, will allow students to use computer and Chinese word-processing software from the very beginning to bypass the tremendous difficulty in learning to write Chinese characters and to acquire overall language proficiency far more rapidly.
Students using Chinese word-processing software should be able to "write" Chinese characters on the computer screen provided they can (a) input on a standard keyboard the romanized letters representing the sound of a Chinese character; and (b) recognize the intended character from among a small group of different characters with the same sound. Had such a word-processing package been available at Bryn Mawr at the time of our survey, students would have been able to reproduce Chinese characters at a level corresponding exactly to their speaking and reading proficiency, an improvement of about 60%. With the use of a computer, there are only two potential sources for error in "writing" Chinese characters: they may mispronounce the character or fail to recognize its visual form (which in reality reflects the problems the students have in either speaking or reading). The software immediately alerts the students to both these mistakes (for the intended Chinese character will not be found on the screen if any one of the two mistakes is made), so "writing" Chinese characters on the screen becomes fully integrated with two other tasks in Chinese language learning---speaking and reading. Although Chinese language is still not "easy" to learn, the removal of the single largest obstacle to the development of early language learning skills will make access to the language much easier.
This approach no doubt has the advantage of helping to reinforce the individual student's knowledge of Chinese romanization system, which is now used in virtually all Chinese word-processing software programs as a major input method. If the software programs are designed to incorporate tone marks in their input methods and to produce the appropriate sound for the selected character appearing on the screen, the student's listening comprehension and pronunciation will be enhanced even further. Theoretically, this approach should even improve the student's ability to recognize Chinese characters, since the student will be constantly urged to make conscious choices between characters with structural similarities as well as differences, rather than depending upon rote memorization of Chinese characters. This approach will also highlight the picto-phonetic characters, which constitute more than 70% of Chinese characters, so that the students can easily learn to separate the phonetic and semantic components of such characters, a skill that will further speed their acquisition of Chinese characters (it should be noted that most of the 44% partially correct characters we found in our Bryn Mawr investigation were picto-phonetic character-related errors). This approach will greatly benefit the development of students' composition ability at a very early stage. The" pen-less" approach proposed here will also have the advantage of bridging the difference between simplified and traditional characters, as the switch-over from one form to another requires no more than clicking the mouse or pressing a single key on the keyboard. Most importantly, this approach will lead to the synchronized development of reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills at a far greater pace, which up to now has been an unrealizable ideal. Borrowing the words of the
Chinese Primer's editors, our approach solves the old problem of how to have the four basic language skills "pursued in concert, and used to reinforce one another" (Ch'en, 1994:xi). With the "pen-less" approach, teachers no longer need to fear that in emphasizing one aspect of the Chinese language learning process they may be exerting a negative impact on the development of the student's comprehensive ability to function in the language, because all four basic language skills will be integrated in such a way that the exercise of anyone of them will have a positive impact on the development of the others.
Finally, looking to a time beyond the scope of this project, we note that the rapid development of speech recognition technology has the potential to make keyboard input unnecessary, which for our approach would mean dictation input instead of keyboard input---the final realization of our premise: as long as one can produce a correct sound and recognize the character among a number of homophones, one can "write" the character on the screen. Technological developments will eventually allow students to simply speak the Chinese word into the computer, and then choose the correct character on the screen.
Our approach raises the concern that students' hand-writing skill will be impaired if instruction is confined to our "pen-less" computerized method, and that they may in fact never develop any hand-writing skills at all. While our approach does attempt to eliminate the difficulties posed by the acquisition of Chinese at the earliest stages, it in no way precludes the possibility that the students may learn to hand-write Chinese characters at a later stage, perhaps out of their own interest in hand-writing or their appreciation of Chinese calligraphy. This proposal merely recognizes that there is a world of difference between choosing to write Chinese characters by hand (to satisfy special needs) and needing to write Chinese characters for the purposes of everyday communication. Students are motivated to learn Chinese language for many different reasons. Most of them hope to function in the language for personal, professional, and social purposes. Such situations seldom require an immediate demonstration of hand-writing skill, while reading, listening, and speaking are constantly brought into play. For students who come to Chinese language learning with a particular interest in Chinese art or aesthetics, some additional courses on character hand-writing and calligraphy could be offered, perhaps even in conjunction with learning classical Chinese. The traditional emphasis on hand-writing in Chinese language instruction can no longer go unexamined. While it is true that our approach will not specifically train students in traditional hand-writing skills at the introductory level, our own investigation at Bryn Mawr and the experience of the vast majority of instructors of Chinese language indicate that those skills are not being effectively taught in any case and that an emphasis on hand-writing leads to a significant number of errors, and hence frustration. Anyone who questions the elimination of hand-writing from basic Chinese language instruction and deplores the disappearance of the pen from Chinese language learning should be reminded of the painful fact that the students within a reasonable time frame simply CANNOT produce Chinese characters with a pen as required in spite of their tremendous efforts. The very essence of our proposal is precisely that it addresses this long-standing problem in Chinese language teaching.
The proposed project includes the following three phases for the total of two academic years (four semesters):
Phase One: First Semester (January 2001-May 2001):
We will develop a Chinese word-processing software specially designed for beginning Chinese language students, with expansion capability for students at higher levels. Dr. Weimin Liu, an experienced software engineer who has also done pioneering work related to Chinese characters, will be contracted for the software design. All other project participants will be actively involved in the software design and testing process. As an integral part of dissemination, this software will, upon completion, be available as a free download from the project's Web site.
We plan to develop a Chinese word-processing software package of our own due to the fact that none of the commercially available Chinese word-processing software packages were designed specifically to accommodate the special needs of Chinese language instruction in general and the "pen-less" approach in particular. Through extensive testing and comparison, we have concluded that an ideal software package for the pen-less approach, and indeed any effective computer-assisted Chinese language instruction, should at least incorporate the following set of features that are lacking in the commercially available packages: (1) It should have complete letter input, instead of partial letter input. That is to say, the student would need to type in all the letters that constitute a complete Pinyin syllable to produce a single Chinese character, not a partial syllable for the sake of time efficiency as we find in all commercial Chinese word-processing software packages. (2) It should require that the student indicate tone as a part of the input, which helps both to narrow down the scope of possible characters having the same sound and aids the student in developing greater accuracy in pronunciation. (3) It should randomly re-order the characters appearing in the input panel every time when a character is chosen so as to make sure that the student chooses a specific character through real recognition, not by remembering its numbered position in the input panel. (4) It should be able to produce the sound of the character when the character is chosen by the student, so as to reinforce the association between the sound and the written symbol. (5) It should have a limited number of Chinese characters in store, so that the students could better concentrate on basic vocabulary appearing in commonly used Chinese textbooks and everyday communication without being overwelmed by huge number of characters. The software package we plan to develop will have all these features. We also want to emphasize that the software we plan to develop will be freely available to anyone who would like to adopt our "pen-less" approach in teaching and learning Chinese language. A commercially available copy of Chinese word-processing software costs anywhere from $99 to over $200, and many schools in this country, as we know, do not have the fund to make a purchase, especially in large quantity, for student use. The creation of a freely available Chinese word-processing software package in and of itself represents an important service to institutions throughout the country, regardless of whether or not those institutions ultimately adopt some version of our "pen-less" approach for their own instruction.
Phase Two: Second and Third Semester (June 2001-May 2002):
This phase will start in June 2001 with a series of meetings among Drs. Theresa Jen, John Yu and Ping Xu, where methods and techniques in accelerating the development of student's overall proficiency will be discussed and formulated. Beginning in August 2001, the project principals will offer a year-long elementary Chinese language instruction to classes (experiment group) at both Baruch and Bryn Mawr to experiment with the methods, techniques and software we developed during Phase 1. Data from traditional, non computer-assisted classes (control group) at the same level at each college will also be collected for comparison.
The vastly different demographics of Baruch College and Bryn Mawr College clearly make this collaborative effort representative of the diversity of institutions of higher learning throughout the U.S. Baruch College is a public, urban, and business-oriented institution where a large number of heritage Chinese speakers are learning Chinese, while Bryn Mawr College is a private, suburban, and liberal arts institution where there are a large number of non-heritage students learning Chinese. The final results of our reform efforts should thus prove adaptable at a wide variety of institutions. Any differences in student response to the new pedagogy at the two institutions during Phase 2 will be examined so that we may adjust our instructional strategies.
The experimental sections will introduce the software at the very beginning of the course, at the same time as the Pinyin system is introduced. Since the input is completely in Chinese romanized letters on a standard keyboard, we anticipate that learning to use the software itself will take less than half an hour in language lab. We expect students to spend no more than 10% of their class time in the language lab during the course of the year, engaged primarily in exercises to develop character recognition and composition skills, and to take exams that require the use of computer. This leaves the remaining 90% of class time available to develop students' oral/aural proficiency and reading skills, a substantial improvement over the amount of time typically available to teach such skills when hand-written characters are taught. For homework assignments, we anticipate students to spend about 30% of their total time using the computer software either in the language lab or their own homes.
Now that the writing of Chinese characters will no longer require any specific training, our instruction in the experimental sections will focus on rapidly improving the students' proficiency in speaking, listening comprehension and reading. The computer-assisted approach makes proper pronunciation paramount and will require that the most commonly used instructional techniques in the Chinese language classroom (dialogue, guided conversation, group performance, audio-visual aids, etc.), be augmented with substantial practice in writing Pinyin through activities such as dictation, conversation transcription, and guided and free composition. In order to develop character recognition, we will focus on developing the students' ability to recognize Chinese characters through general visual impressions and comparison among characters, especially those with structural and phonetic similarities. Effective exercises to develop these skills will include: identifying the correct characters in place of a picto-phonetic related error, pairing characters with structural and phonetic similarities, and speed reading of a text for comprehension. Potential computer-assisted exercises will include asking students to "write" a sentence or short dialogue they hear, "rewrite" in Chinese characters a text originally written in Pinyin, and "rewrite" in Chinese characters a text originally written in Chinese characters.
During Phase 2, the language skills of students will be assessed through the use of outside certified OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) testers, using the objective testing guidelines and protocols developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). We plan to conduct such testing at the beginning and the end of each of the two semesters in both the control and experiment groups. In addition to standard oral proficiency interviews, there will also be extensive testing of student proficiency in reading and writing in Chinese characters. Drs. Theresa Jen, Ping Xu and John Yu will assist outside testers in testing design and result analysis.
Phase Three: Fourth Semester (August 2002-December 2002):
We will disseminate results of our experiments and a thorough description of our new computer-assisted pedagogy through a national workshop for invited Chinese language teaching professionals from selected U.S. secondary and higher educational institutions, to be held at the end of the second year. A package that includes the software and a manual detailing the technical and pedagogical aspects of the "pen-less" approach will be distributed to all workshop participants and made available from a publicized permanent Website devoted to the new teaching approach. The Website will also include audio files of actual student speech samples, on-line discussion and commentary area. The site will be maintained and updated during and after the funded period on servers housed at Baruch College.
Much of the time in this phase will be devoted to the preparation of the manual and developing the Website. Both the workshop and our Website will be publicized on foreign language-related Websites, on-line discussion groups, and in the information and advertisement sections of professional journals, such as the Modern Language Association Newsletter, Foreign Language Annals, The Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, and The Association for Asian Studies Newsletter. In addition to the workshop and the Website, the three principal investigators and the project's evaluator will present a panel on the subject of "pen-less" approach to introduce our teaching methods and techniques, discuss our curriculum design, and demonstrate our software package. We hope to present the panel in one or two nationwide conferences such as the Annual Conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, the Asian Studies Association Annual Conference, or an international conference on Chinese Language instruction. These presentations will eventually be turned into articles for submission to professional journals in second language education.
The following is a chart listing the major goals and objectives of the project and a description of how their attainment will be evaluated:
Time Period |
Major Goals and Objectives |
Evaluation |
| Jan. 2001-May 2001 |
Creation of a Chinese word-processing software specially designed for accelerated Chinese language teaching and learning |
Extensive testing of the software on its effectiveness in all identified functions and its reliability in overall usage. |
| June 2001-May 2002 |
Experiments with control groups by using the software created and new teaching methods and techniques for rapid and comprehensive development of student's proficiency in Chinese language. |
In-house exams by project participants and Oral Proficiency Interviews by outside certified testers throughout the experiment period. The outside evaluator's input based on data collected from the project participants and testers. |
| Aug. 2002-Dec. 2002 |
Dissemination of the project findings and results through conference presentations, a national workshop, and a dedicated website, where the software and a detailed manual will be distributed free of charge. |
Input from participants of conference and workshop, visitors of website, and project evaluator, regarding the effectiveness of the software as well as our new teaching methods and techniques. |
Our evaluation plan has two integral parts, each dependent on and informing the other.
First, during Phase Two, we will conduct extensive evaluation, testing all aspects of students' proficiency through frequent exams administered by project participants and Oral Proficiency Interviews conducted by outside OPI testers. We anticipate that the students in the experiment groups will show significant progress not only in terms of a greater number of lessons covered, but also in terms of a much more balanced development of the four basic language skills than those in the control groups. Our goal is to obtain the maximum pace in the improvement of student proficiency while simultaneously achieving an optimal balance in the development of language skills overall. Students in both experimental groups and control groups at each college will use the same textbooks (
Practical Chinese Reader at Baruch College, and
Chinese Primer at Bryn Mawr College), so the differences in progress and performance between the two groups should be straightforward and significant. A portfolio will be developed for each student in the experimental groups, which will include detailed information about the student's language background, progress, and performance in all aspects of language proficiency. The portfolios will eventually provide us with important information for statistical analysis, especially in comparison to the results from control groups. All the teaching and testing materials will be thoroughly documented and included in the manual and made available on the Website for dissemination at the end of the funded period.
We rely on the Oral Proficiency Interview for entrance-exit evaluation in order to verify the success of our reform efforts with a widely recognized, highly respected standardized testing methodology. OPI is a global assessment of functional language abilities, and as such is highly valid and reliable in its measurement of language functions, content areas, text-type, and accuracy, and assigns the same ratings to the same language samples consistently. The data collected through OPIs will provide hard evidence on the success of the project not only to the project evaluator but to anyone who is considering adopting the "pen-less" approach in their own classrooms. The Oral Proficiency Interviews will be given in both experimental groups and control groups by outside ACTFL-certified testers at both the beginning and the end of each of the two semesters during the Phase Two. Special arrangements will be made with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages to extend the testing into assessment of the students' reading and writing proficiency. The project participants will assist the outside testers in testing design and result analysis.
The project will retain the services of Dr. Scott McGinnis, a senior researcher at NFL based in Washington D.C. and former president of Chinese Language Teachers Association, who will serve as an external evaluator of the project. Two three-day to the project sites are planned, one at the end of first year, and one at the end of the second year. On the first visit, Dr. McGinnis will observe our teaching methods and techniques in the classroom, analyze the outcomes of our testing, and the results of the Oral Proficiency Interviews. Based on this analysis, Dr. McGinnis will provide the project with suggestions for further improvements and refinements for the second half of Phase Two. On his second visit, Dr. McGinnis will repeat his in-class observation and analyze additional data gathered from classroom and OPI testing. The focus during this second evaluation will be on evidence of improvement and students' achievement in overall proficiency. The evaluator will then participate in the national dissemination workshop for Chinese language teaching professionals, and give a preliminary evaluation of the entire project. A final full evaluation report will be completed shortly thereafter for submission to FIPSE.