Configuración de las creencias de autoeficacia en los docentes de la Enseñanza

The difficulties of the language itself are, of course, not unconnected to the ways in which it is best learnt

and taught and this is a major consideration for CFL learners and teachers. This section builds on a

discussion of the challenges for English students of processing the Chinese language, and specifically the

challenges for English secondary school pupils.

2.2.2.1 Perceiving Tones

Perception of tone in Chinese is different from processing stress or intonation patterns in non-tonal

languages such as English, so perceiving the acoustic features of Chinese tone is a completely new

experience for English-speaking learners. Thus when it comes to strategies for learning tones, English

learners may have different views about it, which is one of the research questions addressed in this study.

According to neuropsychological research, regions in the left hemisphere of the brain are activated when

tones are decoded by L1 Chinese listeners, whilst English listeners use the right hemisphere (Klein et al,

2001; Wang, Jongman and Sereno, 2001). Given that the function of the left hemisphere is to process

verbal and logical information, this suggests that listeners from different language backgrounds treat

tones as different types of information. L1 Chinese listeners regard tones as a linguistic stimulus, whereas

tones are simply viewed the same as the pitch or stress with little lexical information for CFL listeners

(Wang, Sereno and Jongman, 2006). It is also possible that learners perceive various features of Chinese

tones as the same (Hu and Tian, 2012; Tsai, 2011), or put the same tone into different categories because

tones do change, depending on the tones adjacent to them (Stagray and Downs, 1993). This means that as

listeners want to develop sensitivity in processing Chinese tones. As Tsai (2011) noted, ―some areas of the brain have to be trained to use tones in the correct way‖ (p. 48).

Wang, Perfetti and Liu (2005) examined the phonological processing skills of English beginner learners

by using matching tasks. Learners outperformed when asked to match the same onset or rime in syllables.

However they did not perform well when matching the same tone in syllables. This was probably because

onset and rime were phonological components of syllables in both English and Chinese, whereas tone

was a distinctive feature of Chinese. Research into L1 Chinese children‘s phonological awareness also

shed some insight on English speakers‘ processing of Chinese speech, particularly of Chinese tones

(Huang and Hanley, 1994; Tang and Wu, 2009; Ren, Xu and Zhang, 2006). Tang and Wu (2009) revealed

that L1 Chinese children‘s tonal awareness was developed more slowly than that of syllabic and rime awareness, even though they had been immersed in an oral Chinese environment. This indicated that, for

those beginning listeners of Chinese, acquiring tonal awareness might be even harder than for L1

Chinese.

In addition, as tones are supra-segmental components associated with the syllable, when people speak

Mandarin, tones always come with the syllables simultaneously. The integration of tones and syllables

makes it more difficult for beginning learners to discriminate the tones (Liu et al., 2011). Some studies

had found English-speaking learners were likely to take the tone as an isolated unit and paid much

attention to the tones of the words when listening (Hu and Tian, 2012). Moreover, it had been argued that

most instructions on Chinese pronunciation emphasised the significance of tones, to the extent that they

diverted learners‘ attention to the isolated tones rather than to the sound of words (Lin, 1985). When

listening to authentic oral speech in Chinese, learners were required to perceive the tones and syllables

Given the limited capacity of short term memory (STM) (Gathercole et al, 1999), automatic processing of

oral input is required for listening to Chinese effectively. This goal can only be achieved by extensive

practice of listening and repeating tones and syllables together. Some researchers suggested musical

training is useful, as the same functional part of the brain was activated when processing music and some

tonal features of Mandarin (Liu et. al, 2011; Wong and Perrachione, 2007).

2.2.2.2 The Processing of Transliteration Systems

There is little literature about how learners of Chinese process transliteration systems. A handful of

studies though, showed that the use of a transliteration system facilitated English speaking learners in

learning Chinese pronunciation and characters (Bassetti, 2007; Everson, 1988; McGinnis, 1997; Wang

and Gao, 2011; Kupfer, 2003).

McGinnis (1997) compared the effectiveness of pinyin and GR, and found ―GR did not lead to significantly greater accuracy in tonal production for English speaking learners‖ (p.232). McGinnis explained that, this was probably because lots of GR with tones spellings were so similar to English

words that learners tended to read them as English words, for example in the case of ―been‖, the second ―e‖ was a tone spelling here. Processing the tone representation in spellings might also draw learners‘ attention away from the combination of consonant and vowel, resulting in a poor pronunciation of both

the tone and the syllable. As for the effect of pinyin on pronunciation learning, as discussed above,

although pinyin was a Romanized representation, the orthography of pinyin symbols were not quite as

straightforward as English phonemes (Bassetti, 2007; McGinnis, 1997). English-speaking learners might

pronounce incorrectly when making use of their English phonological skills to process pinyin spellings

awareness development across languages, that is, from syllable to subsyllabic unit, such as onset and rime

(Carroll et al, 2003; Tang and Wu, 2009; Ren, Xu and Zhang, 2006). However, phonological awareness is

based on learners‘ experience of their L1 spoken languages. When it comes to the cross-language transfer of phonological skills, beginner English learners‘ lack of exposure to the Chinese language might lead to challenges for them in learning Chinese pronunciation via pinyin. Whether it is possible for English

speakers to transfer their phonological awareness of English to analyse pinyin remains unknown. There is

little literature about this and thus how early pinyin should be introduced and used in Chinese learning

becomes a big issue and will be addressed in this study.

In terms of the effect of transliteration systems on processing characters, Everson (1988) examined

reading speed and comprehension when reading Chinese in pinyin and characters. The result showed that

reading in pinyin was faster and easier to understand than in characters for first-year university learners of

Chinese in the US. Likewise, the role of pinyin in the phonology-character link was demonstrated in the

studies of Guan et al (2011) and Wang and Gao (2011). The phonological representations of written

scripts were explicitly presented through pinyin spellings. Chung (2002) summarised three reasons for

providing pinyin in CFL: a) pinyin helped the pronunciation of characters as the phonological

subcomponent of characters were not reliable in predicting the exact sound of characters; b) pinyin

facilitated learners when pronouncing unknown characters, and c) knowledge of pinyin enabled learners

to know the sound of new characters by themselves instead of relying on the teacher‘s help. Bassetti (2007) suggested that it was necessary to use pinyin to learn Chinese at the beginning stage, to get

students ready for character learning later. However, she also noted the pinyin orthography had a negative

impact on the pronunciation of both beginners and intermediate Mandarin learners.

character learning are contentious. Moreover, the processing of Chinese characters brings out another

potential challenge for English beginner learners.

2.2.2.3 The Processing of Chinese Characters

Although models of reading in Chinese are the subject of some debate (Perfetti and Wang, 2006; Wang,

Perfetti and Liu, 2005), there is a difference between reading Chinese and reading English. Due to the

logographic nature of Chinese written scripts, reading Chinese written characters requires the ability to

recognise the internal structural characteristics of characters, in terms of the strokes, radicals and the

spatial arrangement of sub-segments. Accordingly, much emphasis is put on visual-orthographic skills to

crack the pictorial code rather than on phonological awareness (Huang and Hanley, 1994).Whereas when

it comes to reading English, since a cluster of phonemes are used to represent the meaning of words, it

might require more phonological information to decode the meanings of English words. This probably

further explains the reason why pinyin was suggested to be introduced to English learners in the

beginning by Bassetti (2007), as mentioned above. Although the ability to recognise the orthographic

features of English letters also mattered in the processing of meanings, the task was less challenging than

in the case of Chinese characters (Huang and Hanley, 1999).

Nevertheless, some studies argued that reading Chinese also involved phonological processing in that as

many as 90% of Chinese characters were phonetic-semantic compounds (Zhu, 1987). The phonetic

component could to some extent indicate the sound of characters, and in turn learners could gain access to

the meanings of words via the phonological route from their oral language resources (Everson, 1998).

This might be possible for the skilled readers who had gained rich experience of spoken Chinese, as the

Shen, 2008). In practice as discussed above, sound-meaning connection is less robust than that of the

orthographic-meaning in Chinese reading. This is because of the validity of phonetic compound function,

as well as the large amount of homophones in Chinese. Thus phonological processing is not sufficient to

distinguish word meanings. Homophones only can be decoded through the written forms in Chinese, thus

a stronger link between Chinese characters and meanings is demanded for Chinese reading. Furthermore,

extra attention and deep processing are demanded to extract highly detailed distinctive features when

reading. CFL learners need to re-orientate their attention to the salient features of Chinese characters so

that they can access the meaning of the word. In that case, the learning of characters seems to be

significant for English-speaking learners. This is an important area in learning and teaching Chinese, and

thus in this study, when and how to learn characters will be examined from the perspectives of teachers

and students.

As for the training of learners‘ orthographic processing skills, Tan et al (2005) concluded in their experimental study, ―the ability to read Chinese is strongly related to writing skills‖ (p.8781). Through repetitive writing practice, it was easier for learners to be aware of the internal structural features of

characters and accordingly established their analysing skills of subcomponents on character recognition

(Tse et al., 2007). Guan et al. (2011) also noted that the sensor-motor memory helped learners to

consolidate the connections between orthography and meanings, and such procedural memory could last

for a long period of time since it was learnt and stabilised via intensive writing. This means writing

characters is crucial to reading Chinese, in a way which is not true of English- possibly a very important

issue in teaching Chinese.

In addition, as Chinese characters are formed by a finite number of basic strokes, minor differences of

―末‖). Therefore every stroke should be properly written down according to the standard rules. Furthermore, evidence from psychological research demonstrated that specific stroke orders were

necessary in writing Chinese characters (Giovanni, 1994; Luo et al, 2010; Qiu and Zhou, 2010). Giovanni

(1994) pointed out, the orders of strokes were stored as a motor schema in memory which provided cues

in retrieving the whole shapes of characters in reading and writing. Luo et al. (2010) noted that stroke

sequence revealed the processing of the spatial configuration of characters in a learner‘s memory.

However, this is not significant in writing English letters, as the strokes of letters are much simpler than

Chinese strokes and automaticity occurs at a letter level.

The issue which is mentioned above, but which I have not yet discussed, explicitly is the characteristics of

the CFL learner in English secondary schools. This is important, because it is the English speaking pupil

in secondary school who needs to be able to use the strategies mentioned above, to benefit from

appropriate teacher support and to master the linguistic difficulties.

2.2.2.4 CFL learners in English Secondary Schools

Some factors influence the effectiveness of language processing strategies in terms of the characteristics

of English pupil learners, such as the L1 background (Yang, 2008), Age (Wang, 2011), language

proficiency level (CILT, 2007), motivation (Coleman, Galaczi and Astruc, 2007; Dornyei, 2009), and

attitudes and beliefs (Higgins and Sheldon, 2001; Hu, 2010; Wang and Higgins, 2008).

For English pupils with an alphabetic language background, learning Chinese is a completely different

experience from that of L1 Chinese. As discussed above, the language skills they developed from English

acquisition are not suitable for Chinese learning. Unlike adult learners, child learners are still in the

subcomponents of characters (Liu and Jiang, 2004). Teenagers at the time of puberty may be distracted,

lack self-discipline and show less commitment to learning in Chinese lessons (Wang, 2011). This is an

issue in making progress in Chinese learning.

With regards to proficiency levels, CILT (2007) reported that the large majority of pupils were at the entry

level. Due to the lack of Mandarin provision and short learning time, most pupils were learning Mandarin

in KS3, especially in Year7 (CILT, 2007). As for pupils‘ motivation for learning Chinese, Wang (2009)

revealed that pupils‘ willingness to learn Mandarin came from their positive attitudes towards Chinese language (i.e. difficult but challenging), teacher support and classroom environment. Indeed, pupils‘

perceptions played a crucial role in their persistence in learning the language. Learners‘ attitudes towards

effort, strategy and ability were influenced by the success of language learning (William et al, 2004).

Learners‘ beliefs led them to adapt learning approaches which they think were effective for learning. If there was a mismatch between their expectations and their language performance, it could cause

frustration and in turn hinder learners‘ progress at language learning (Cotterall, 1999; Horwitz, 1988; Kim, 2011). Most learners in English secondary schools dropped Chinese learning classes later at KS4 level,

not only because of the difficulty of the language learning, but also because of their negative beliefs about

their own learning and teaching approaches (Wang, 2009). Further evidence of the link between language

beliefs and effective use of strategy was found in Hu and Tian‘s survey (2012). CFL college learners in England were likely to use the strategies which they perceive as highly effective. Although their study

was focused on adult learners, it still shed some light on beliefs of young learners and their choices of

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