Development and Evaluation of a Chinese Character Educational Board Game for Non-Native Learners

There is no doubt that knowing Chinese gives graduates a competitive advantage. The ability to communicate fluently in Chinese has long been a requirement for Chinese employers, particularly those looking to do business in China's e-commerce market. Non-native learners must master four fundamental abilities in order to become literate in the Chinese language: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Previous research has found that writing Chinese characters is frequently the most difficult task for both non-native and native learners. The issue arises during the process of learning Chinese characters and excessive use of gadgets, while online learning inspires both researchers to create a Chinese educational board game dubbed the LiSCReW Family Board Game (LiSCReW). LiSCReW is an acronym for Listen, Speak, Count, Read, and Write. The purpose of this study is (i) to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of the LiSCReW for learning Chinese characters; and (ii) to share non-native learners' perspectives and experiences while playing LiSCReW during a one-day exhibition at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Johor Campus. To facilitate playtesting and evaluation of the board game, a total of 22 students from UiTM Johor were conveniently selected. The findings indicate that the LiSCReW board game is an effective educational tool for learning Chinese characters. The results show that respondents are more confident in recognising Chinese characters (90.9%), pronouncing Chinese characters (68.2%), reading Chinese characters (54.6%), and applying the Chinese characters they learned while playing LiSCReW to their Chinese test (77.2%). The findings can be used to guide future research into the empirical testing of Flow Theory's applicability among a large number of respondents.

On-Reading (Chinese-Style Pronunciation) Predominance Over Kun-Reading (Native Japanese Pronunciation) in Japanese Semantic Dementia

Japanese kanji (morphograms) have two ways of reading: on-reading (Chinese-style pronunciation) and kun-reading (native Japanese pronunciation). It is known that some Japanese patients with semantic dementia read kanji with on-reading but not with kun-reading. To characterize further reading impairments of patients with semantic dementia, we analyzed data from a total of 9 patients who underwent reading and writing tests of kanji and kana (Japanese phonetic writing) and on-kun reading tests containing two-character kanji words with on-on reading, kun-kun reading, and specific (so-called Jukujikun or irregular kun) reading. The results showed that on-reading preceding (pronouncing first with on-reading) and kun-reading deletion (inability to recall kun-reading) were observed in nearly all patients. In the on-kun reading test, on-reading (57.6% correct), kun-reading (46.6% correct), and specific-reading (30.0% correct) were more preserved in this decreasing order (phonology-to-semantics gradient), although on-reading and kun-reading did not significantly differ in performance, according to a more rigorous analysis after adjusting for word frequency (and familiarity). Furthermore, on-substitution (changing to on-reading) errors in kun-reading words (27.0%) were more frequent than kun-substitution (changing to kun-reading) errors in on-reading words (4.0%). These results suggest that kun-reading is more predominantly disturbed than on-reading, probably because kun-reading and specific-reading are closely associated with the meaning of words.

Meanings within meanings: Skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. The cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999). We investigated whether readers automatically activate the semantics associated with a radical even when it is irrelevant to the character’s meaning, using a modified version of the Van Orden (1987) task. Fifty-one Mandarin speakers participated in the study. On each trial they were shown a reference category such as “animal” prior to seeing a target character then indicated whether the target character was a member of that category. Decisions were slower and less accurate when a target that is not a member of the target category contained a radical that is. For example, if the category is “found in the kitchen,” the answer for the target 券 (ticket) is no; however the character contains the misleading radical 刀 (knife). These patterns suggest that readers process the semantics of the radical even when it is not relevant to the meaning of the character. The results present challenges for theories in which whole characters are the units of processing in reading Chinese. They also raise questions as to whether repetitions of this experience may result in some of the irrelevant semantics influencing the meaning of the character.

Compound word frequency modifies the effect of character frequency in reading Chinese

In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high-frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low-frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis, according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process.

Systemic Functional Grammar Analysis of News Reports of Li Wenliang Incident

Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of Covid-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly reproduce the event process. The second is the verbal process, which shows that news reports are good at making use of multi-channel speech sources to enhance the authority and objectivity of reports. The third is the relational process and psychological process, which reflects the subtlety of news report content and the concealment of attitude. This paper reveals the ideological direction implied in the news reports through seemingly neutral and objective reports, aiming at providing reference for readers in the process of reading Chinese and foreign political discourse.