An Experimental Study On Reading Strategies Of Pictophonetic Characters By Intermediate Learners Of Chinese As A Second Language

Phonetic radical pronunciation of pictophonetic character can provide clues for the complexcharacter pronunciation. Students can take advantage of this trail, which provided by phoneticradical pronunciation, to learn and memory character pronunciation, and form reading strategies.Researching student’s reading strategies helps teachers to guide students to use readingstrategies of pictophonetic character, so as to promote their characters learning. This studyexplored the mental effects, strategies and the development degree of strategies onpictophonetic characters pronunciation by intermediate learners of Chinese as a secondlanguage by pronunciation experiments and attempted to propose teaching suggestions basingon results.The study concluded two experiments of which variables concluded familiarity degree ofpictophonetic characters and phonetic radicals, phonetic level of radicals and native backgroundof subjects.100pictophonetic characters were choosed from the Chinese words and Chinesecharacters grading syllabus as the experiment materials. Subjects were intermediate learnerswhich came from Chinese culture circles and non-cultural circles. In these experiments,subjects were asked to write down the phonetic for materials within the given time. Results asfollows:(1) Phonetic level of radicals and familiarity degree of characters had significantinfluences on the characters pronunciation. Interactions between two factors were alsosignificant. The result showed that intermediate learners had had the awareness of usingphonetic radical pronunciation to infer corresponding character pronunciation.(2) Thefrequency of phonetic radical had significant influences on the characters pronunciation.Correct rates of characters with low frequency radicals were higher. These results showed thatword phonetic radicals interfered with pronunciation of corresponding characters.(3) Phoneticradical pronunciation and phonogram family pronunciation were commonly used to get thecomplex characters pronunciation, especially the phonetic radical one. More errors caused byusing these strategies showed that the strategy application of learners was still in the primarystage and phonetic rules of radicals could not be consciously induced.(4) The nativebackground only had significant influences on the pronunciation correct rates. This resultshowed that the native background only had effects on learners’ literacy amount except thephonetic radical awareness and the development degree of strategies.