马来学生对汉字的认知方式和认字教学的实践方法
Authors: 燕 黄灵 
Published: May 2016

This study mainly investigated cognitive methods adopted by Malay learners who were taking Chinese proficiency courses at the University of Putra Malaysia. The respondents were learners who came from an alphabetic writing background. The findings of this study revealed that three cognitive methods were adopted by these respondents to recognize and retrieve the meanings of Chinese characters. The first method was to use phonetic symbols to write down the pronunciations of Chinese characters in order to comprehend the meanings of the characters. The respondents needed to pass through the intermediary stage of the inner language to activate the meanings of the characters. This response is a normal psychological reaction from the Chinese language learners who come from an alphabetic writing background.

For the second method, the respondents used the vocabulary of their mother tongue to translate the meanings of Chinese characters. The findings showed that they depended on their mother tongue when comprehending the meanings of Chinese characters. Some respondents needed to search for the equivalent vocabulary in their mother tongue to translate the meanings of Chinese characters before they could retrieve the accurate meanings of the characters. This reaction shows that the method of acquisition of the mother tongue can affect the cognition ability of learners when comprehending the meanings of Chinese characters and during the reading process of Chinese texts.

The third method concerned some respondents who could master Chinese characters and obtain a high level of Chinese proficiency. They were able to retrieve the meanings of Chinese characters directly from Chinese orthography without depending on the stimulus of the inner language or translation of the mother tongue to decode the meanings of the characters. The results of the Chinese comprehension test revealed that the respondents who obtained a high level of Chinese proficiency were not hindered by the difficulties in recognizing and comprehending the meanings of the Chinese characters. Their scores in the comprehension test were the highest.

The feedback from the questionnaire used showed that some respondents did not necessarily have to rely on the stimulus of the inner language as the intermediary stage to activate the meanings of Chinese characters. Most of the respondents preferred to use the vocabulary of their mother tongue to help them to retrieve the meanings of the characters. Regarding the stimulus of the inner language or the translation of the mother tongue for decoding, both these methods showed that there was interference from the mother tongue’s orthography of the respondents. However, the results of the comprehension test revealed that when the respondents were familiar with Chinese characters, they could abandon both the methods mentioned when retrieving the meanings of the characters.

Finally, this study suggests some instructional practices for recognizing Chinese characters to assist Chinese language learners from the alphabetic writing background to better recognize the characteristics of Chinese orthography. These practices emphasize learning activities for standard Chinese language orthography. Emphasis also is given to the knowledge relating to the features and characteristics of Chinese characters from an ideogram language. Further stress is on the effective methods to retrieve the meanings directly from Chinese characters.