Decoding Strategies Used by Chinese Primary School Children

This study explored the ways Chinese children remember and decode characters. Thirty primary school children in two cities in China reported how they recognized and remembered individual characters. Of the ten strategy categories identified from the children's responses, three that analyzed cha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of literacy research 2003-06, Vol.35 (2), p.777-812
Main Authors: Pine, Nancy, Ping'an, Huang, Ren Song, Huang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Character Recognition
Children
Chinese
Chinese languages
Comparative analysis
Data Analysis
Decoding
Elementary school students
Invented Spelling
Literacy
Memory
Primary Education
Reading acquisition
Romanization
Writing
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Summary:This study explored the ways Chinese children remember and decode characters. Thirty primary school children in two cities in China reported how they recognized and remembered individual characters. Of the ten strategy categories identified from the children's responses, three that analyzed character structure dominated. These three categories, as well as several others, emphasized visual processing rather than phonetic processing and suggest emphasis on visual perception. The first-, second-, and third-grade children readily divided characters into structural components and individual strokes. The study concludes that learning written Chinese engaged these children in using semiotic systems unique to their written code and distinct from those usually emphasized in English literacy learning. Interviewer: Is [the character] right or not? Child: No. Interviewer: How do you know that? Child: Because the end part of it shouldn't be this horizontal bar, but four dots. First Grade Student, China
ISSN:1086-296X
1554-8430
DOI:10.1207/s15548430jlr3502_5