A Study On The Correlation Between Chinese Character Recognition Ability And Oral Language Performance Of Intermediate Chinese Learners From Western Countries

In the area of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Chinese character has been regarded as a major difficulty. However, learners can not avoid Chinese characters if they need to read and write. Learners with better Chinese character knowledge may acquire more language input through reading,thus more diverse input stimulus may result in different language output. Yet the correlation between adjusted Chinese character-based input and oral output is complex. This thesis aims to understand the correlation between Chinese character recognition and oral language performance by analyzing the data of investigation. Intermediate-level students from western countries were requested to take a Chinese character recognition test, an oral test and to fill in a questionnaire about character learning condition.As the theoretical and practical basis of this paper.the first part reviewed Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis, language performance analysis and the major achievements of former studies on the relationship between word and language proficiency.The second part introduced the research design, including the study idea,the object being surveyed, the instruments being used and the methods of data collecting.The research instruments have satisfactory reliability and validity. The average score of character recognition is 0.78 out of 2. It’s easier to be recognized if the character is of higher frequency. In the oral test, the speed matched their language level. There appeared considerable hesitations and pauses as the learners used too much self-monitoring. The syntactic accviracy rate reached 69.41%. They used the language forms that they had confidence with, yet there were fossilized errors. As for the indexes of language complexity,they used quite a few conjunction words so the average length of T-unit was 21.61. High-level words and syntactic structures were not often applied.Part four firstly look into the learners’character studying belief and behaviors. Students investigated focused more on the glyph and pronunciation of a character than the meaning. Out of class,they learn characters incidentally through movie subtitles and song lyrics,but rarely read initiatively. They don’t hold a specific Chinese character learning plan but can reflect on their character progress when reaching a certain stage. Their way of getting character-based input is very limited. Then this thesis investigated the differences between upper-and lower-level students in character recognition,and then analyzed the correlation between Chinese character recognition ability and oral language performance. The results are as following. The upper-and lower-level students showed significant differences in character recognition,the frequency of "taking notes in characters" and "hand-writing compositions". Their other methods of memorizing and applying characters did not show any significant difference, neither did their oral language performance. However, learners with better scores in recognizing high-frequency characters showed advantages in oral complexity and fluency. The advantage in complexity was more obvious. Since there was no significant difference in recognizing low-frequency characters, learners got character-based input from almost the same approach, it was hard to find the difference in their oral output caused by a different input stimulus. But in the end, this thesis discovered that there existed some correlation between high-frequency character recognition and oral complexity. Learners better at characters spoke longer T-unit and used more complex syntactic structures.