This entry is not on chatting but on reading digital texts. Reading Levy and Stockwell’s (2006) book CALL Dimensions (NOT for our class) where they discuss various CALL applications (including WebQuest and Web Inquiry Projects) made me think about the level of exposure of Chinese learners to authentic Chinese texts. It usually happens pretty late – during the 4th year.
The Chinese language not being an alphabetic language makes it very difficult to read authentic materials. So there is this constant worry about overloading students with authentic reading because if they don’t know the pronunciation of a word, they can’t look it up (which is relative fast and easy) in a dictionary. In this case they would have to check a dictionary for a word by strokes or radicals which take a lot of time if there are a lot of characters like that. Another problem is that if learners don’t know a good number of words in a given text, they will have trouble identifying where the word boundaries are (there is no space between characters, so it’s hard to tell where a word begins and where it ends).
However, there are downloadable programs that allow relatively easy reading. One needs to copy and paste a text into the program/document, then point at any word with the cursor and the definition/definitions and pronunciation of the word will be provided. It makes unfamiliar reading so much easier.
My question is then based on your experience and on what I wrote above, do you think let’s say 3rd year students of Chinese should be exposed to unformatted original texts (news articles, interviews, etc. from online news websites, for instance) since they can easily read them if they (assuming they use the software for reading Chinese texts)? My take on this is that it is beneficial and it should be done, but what’s your take on this? Can you predict any problems with it?
And if you are a Chinese speaker, do you know of any such software/dictionaries that I can download? Thanks.
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Most research shows that exposure to authentic texts is beneficial. It's the task that you make them do with the text that matter, and, as you said, the resources you provide them to read or interact with them. What authentic texts could beginning Chinese students read? How about advertisements? comic strips? children's books?
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting. I haven't taught Chinese but I guess the characters are not easy to learn. It probably takes a lot of time to learn to read Chinese.
ReplyDeleteBut I think teachers of other languages are also concerned about what authentic material they should use with beginning learners. I still remember that for the first several years when I was learning English, I had never been exposed to any authentic material in English, and right after I got into college where I had access to authentic materials like magazines and newspapers I tried to read them - and I was very frustrated to find that I couldn't understand the language.
I think Jon proposed some good ideas about what may suit the beginning learners. Here are a few more:
city signs / short facebook postings (they are rich in culture) / (I'm still thinking hard...)