use of Pinyin and the effectiveness of learning unfamiliar characters in Chinese L1
students’ literacy ability. In the studies where first grade native Chinese-speaking children were reading independently, incidental character learning was found more effective when the materials were captioned with Pinyin on all characters (Full Pinyin condition) or only on the focal new characters (Partial Pinyin condition) than when the materials were not captioned with Pinyin at all (No Pinyin condition) (Li, Wu, Zhang, Zheng, & Zhu, 2011; Wu et al., 2002).
However, the teacher’s instruction can change the effect of Pinyin on the learning of Chinese characters. When the teacher provided robust instruction and specific
activities to integrate the sound, meaning, and shape of the focal unfamiliar characters in whole group teaching, the learning of the characters’ pronunciation was not significantly different between Full Pinyin, Partial Pinyin, or No Pinyin conditions (Wu, Li, & Liu, 2009). However, in shared-reading activities where the teacher did not provide specific instruction on the unfamiliar characters, the recall of unfamiliar characters’ pronunciation was significantly less in the Partial Pinyin condition than in Full Pinyin or No Pinyin conditions (Wu, Li, Shu, Anderson, & Li, 2002). This indicates Pinyin is not more effective for students to connect the sound, meaning, and shape of the unfamiliar characters when teacher instruction on the unfamiliar characters is provided. Additionally, Pinyin captioning could interfere with the incidental learning of the unfamiliar characters when teacher did not provide robust instruction on the characters because learners may not engage all of their attention to integrate the shape, meaning, and sound of the unfamiliar characters, rather than being overloaded or distracted by the Pinyin captions.
A longitudinal study by Li, Wu, Zhang, Zheng, and Zhu (2011) compared students’ learning of Chinese characters in a Full Pinyin condition and No Pinyin condition over a one-year instruction using the shared reading approach. The results again showed no significant difference between these two conditions. In addition, they found that students reported significantly lower self-efficacy when reading texts with Pinyin than those who read texts without Pinyin. The results suggest that students who were given texts with Pinyin were less motivated to read in Chinese than students who read texts without Pinyin. Taken together, Wu and his colleagues suggested that Pinyin captioning on unfamiliar characters interfered with the learning of Chinese characters. Full Pinyin learning condition may be a more effective method for low ability students in independent reading activities.
While Pinyin was not helpful for Chinese L1 children learning characters in instructional literacy activities, the role of Pinyin in the learning of characters for L2 learners of Chinese has not been clear. In a recent study, Wang, McBride, Zhou, Malatesha Joshi, and Farver (2018) compared the learning of unfamiliar characters between 29 native speaking children and 34 non-native speaking children in Hong Kong. Again, they found that native Chinese-speaking second or third graders who used
phonological codes (an alphabetic system similar to Pinyin) were not significantly better at the learning of Chinese characters compared to students in the condition where
students received look-say methods (Look-say condition), or who were given radical knowledge of the characters (Radical condition), or where students were given character copying training (Copying condition). However, non-native Chinese speaking students
learned new characters significantly better with phonological representations than those who were in the Look-say, Radical, or Copying conditions. The authors suggest that when phonological representations are provided, non-native Chinese speaking children with alphabetic language background as L1 could retrieve the pronunciation of Chinese characters better.
The effect of Pinyin captioning on learning the characters was mixed for adult learners. Chung (2003) compared the effectiveness of written Pinyin and verbal
pronunciation as stimulus prompts on the learning of unfamiliar characters. Participants who were given written Pinyin feedback recalled significantly more characters than those who received verbal pronunciation feedback. However, the presence of Pinyin and Chinese characters simultaneously may not be a prime learning condition because Chinese L2 learners may focus more on Pinyin rather than on the shape of unfamiliar characters. Chung (2002) compared the learning of unfamiliar Chinese characters when written Pinyin prompts were presented at the same time or five seconds after displaying the characters with English-speaking adolescent or college learners of Chinese. He found that participants performed significantly better on the recall of unfamiliar characters’ pronunciation when there was a temporal spacing to display the characters and Pinyin. These two studies suggested that adolescent participants benefited more from written Pinyin feedback than verbal demonstration in the learning of the unfamiliar characters, but the alphabetic Pinyin may hijack the students’ cognitive resources when it is presented with the characters at the same time for L2 learners with an alphabetic orthography background.
Additionally, the mixed findings on the effect of Pinyin on the learning of Chinese characters may be due to the different ways in which students received the instructions when learning the unfamiliar characters. The series of studies conducted by Wu and his colleagues modelled the real classroom reading activities where students learned the new characters in meaningful contexts and in multiple literacy activities that tend to connect the sound, meaning, and shape of the Chinese characters. However, in the above-reviewed studies on L2 learners, the participants learned the new characters in decontextualized manners, relied on rote memorization skills, and only received one or the other training to learn the characters’ pronunciation.
Unlike Chinese L1 learners who have developed strong oral vocabulary knowledge before learning to read, Chinese L2 learners acquire oral vocabulary
knowledge at the same time as developing literacy skills. Because of the important role of meaning in Chinese reading acquisition, it is critical to examine the learning of both sound and meaning of Chinese words when the learners are provided with robust
vocabulary instruction and engaged in meaningful reading activities that require them to make sense of texts.