| This study proposes that explicit marking of text boundaries facilitates learning Mandarin Chinese. The concept of marking text boundaries is first examined with the Verbal Efficiency, Chunking and Automaticity theories, and it is found that marking text boundaries in Chinese (a) supports the Verbal Efficiency theory, (b) is similar to chunking in an alphabetic language, and (c) should be used as a “tool” to facilitate reading for students learning Chinese.; A system for marking text boundaries in Pinyin and Chinese characters is proposed. The system is more efficient and consistent than previous proposals because it is designed on the basis of (a) the survey results of the learners' preference on text boundaries in Chinese; (b) a clarification of the concept of chunking in Chinese by way of examining three common definitions of “word,” namely, syntactic, phonological and morphological words; and (c) an analysis of previous proposals with a focus on improving efficiency and consistency.; Three experiments are conducted to analyze (a) the effect of text boundaries on the learners' reading performance in contrast to other different script presentations such as syllabic boundaries, no boundaries and wrong text boundaries; (b) the long-term effect of Chinese text boundaries in language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing; and (c) the relation between the application of text boundaries and text difficulty levels.; The major findings are: (a) a script difference exists between texts written in Pinyin and those written in Chinese characters and such a difference should be reflected in a system that marks Chinese text boundaries more consistently and efficiently; (b) reading materials with text boundaries have a facilitative effect on reading performance, especially on more difficult texts; and (c) learners show a significant progress after applying marked boundaries in Chinese texts over a period of 8 weeks, especially in the area of reading comprehension and writing with the help of a Chinese word processor. |
