Pedagogic Perspectives on Chinese Characters Teaching for Latin American Students

Chinese characters are one of the most representative components of Chinese language. However, due to its complexity, the teaching of the language has become an important research topic. With the expansion of this language, it is important to analyze and reconsider approaches to inspire and guide students with different cultural backgrounds, languages and learning habits, and highlight their advantages and disadvantages. Based on two beginner level groups of Chinese in Mexico, this report analyzes teaching strategies, pedagogical activities and students’ attitudes towards two professors, a local Mexican teacher and a Chinese teacher. After observing both classes we found significant differences on their approaches to teach Chinese characters. The Chinese teacher emphasized the importance of characters as a communication tool and therefore tried to develop accuracy and efficiency, while the Mexican teacher focused on knowledge about characters, the association with students’ own experiences and self-directed learning techniques. We conclude with making remarks about which of these teaching approaches are more suitable for the teaching context of Chinese language in Latin American countries like Mexico.

pronunciation of the character.In the case of teaching characters to adults who are accustomed to using an orthographic rather than logographic system, there is a constant debate on how the characters should be taught, including the optimal time for character teaching (Ye, 2013), the efficiency of the use of visual and phonological mnemonics (Kuo & Hooper, 2004), radical analysis (Taft & Chung, 1999;Shen, 2007), effectiveness of stroke-order learning (Hsiaung, Chang, Chen, & Sung, 2017) and the use of electronic resources in character learning (Lam et al., 2001).Although comparisons of different teaching approaches have been made, results of these researches are only applicable to a few aspects in character teaching.They guide teachers in the effectiveness of different exercises and help teachers to make an informed decision in the design of the teaching plan based on the course objectives and the characteristics of the students.Nevertheless, few research has focused on the macroscopic aspects regarding pedagogic approaches and objectives in the process of character teaching.This article is based on observing classes of two first-level groups of Chinese language in the Confucius Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and analyzes the process and results of different teaching methods employed by two teachers in order to know how they affect the acquisition of knowledge, obtainment of skills for character recognition and writing, as well as changes in student attitude.The aim of this article is to present the complexity and importance of research on Chinese character teaching and to highlight aspects that should be taken into account when taking an approach to the teaching of this writing system.

Case study 2.1 Objects of analysis
We observed pedagogical activities in two groups of first-level Chinese course from week 2 to week 8 in the spring of 2017 at the Confucius Institute, UNAM.Opinions and comments from students and teachers were collected.During this period, students began to learn characters related to basic daily communication.Both groups used the same textbook Hanyu Jiaocheng (Course on Chinese Language) Vol. 1 Part one, which covers the basics of the language and elementary communicative skills such as shopping and ordering food, and requires students to master about 60 characters.An important aspect to be mentioned of this book is that it does not take into account the difficulty of characters.It is organized based on grammatical concepts and communication needs, so the teachers can modify the teaching sequence to reduce difficulty of the course.Group A had 23 students and was taught by a local Mexican teacher, while group B had 25 students and was taught by a teacher of Chinese nationality.Both teachers have more than 5 years of experience in teaching Chinese.

Case description
Below is a description of highlighted parts of both classes.The contents related directly to the teaching of characters will be analyzed especially in the following aspects.

Teaching objectives and methods
Through a brief interview both teachers were asked how they thought the teaching of characters should be and a summary of their answers is given below: Group A: The teacher believes that the learning process must be as active as possible, trying to arouse the interest and attract the attention of the students so as to allow learning in advanced stages to be simpler and self-directed, and to help students remember and give them a wider context.She mentioned, "I try to relieve stress from the classroom where we can talk freely about the characters so as to make students feel that the Chinese characters are not too difficult, because they were also hard for me when I was a student.In this way I try to give them a message that they can adopt whatever methods that suit them the best to learn characters."Group B: The teacher bases the class on her knowledge of the language structure and believes that it is important to learn characters in an orderly way and pay attention to details of the characters.She said, "The characters you learn in the first-level period will be the basis for later stages, so it is very important for students at this stage to know well how to write characters, including the basic strokes, stroke order, the radicals and their meaning, and the size and proportion of each component of the characters.If not, it will be difficult to get rid of bad habits later.Also, practicing writing ensures that you learn to read quickly."2.2.2 Ways to introduce and teach the characters Group A: In the beginning of week 2 the teacher explained the differences between orthographic and logographic writing systems, giving several examples of cultures employing logographic systems, particularly the Maya civilization as reference which developed in Mexico and Central America.The Maya people used glyphs to represent concepts which in turn were related to the sound of a syllable just like Mandarin Chinese.The teacher gave the example of the word montaña (mountain) (Figure 1) to show the similarities in the logic of the characters (a pictorial representation associated with a concept) and that the Chinese writing is not very complex compared to the Maya system, in which each symbol has many more details as can be seen on the character mountain.She also made use of the reference to the Maya writing system to elucidate another similitude between Chinese characters and Mayan hieroglyphics.The use of meaningful components or radicals to form new symbols reduces learning and writing difficulty as shown in Figure 2 where the component of the Mayan word ik' is inserted at the center of another ass.ccsenet.a way to remember and associate.Therefore, even if the presented explication did not match the historical origin of the character, it was still instrumental for students to remember and comprehend the logic of the characters, which motivated them to present different interpretations without being afraid of errors, for instance, when studying the character 文 (wen2, culture) students offered several interpretations: "文 has to do with the first characters that were written in tortoise shells, so the character for writing and culture is represented with a turtle.""Culture is what gives you identity.It is like a big tattoo that you have written on your chest.""People who had culture and knew how to write were those with a lot of money and ample clothes like the person that seemed walking in the character wearing a large robe."Some of the interpretations were based on the students' imagination, which is not necessarily the official origin of the characters, but were accepted as useful in order to understand the characters.
In the exercise of writing sentences on the board the students made multiple mistakes in writing the characters.The teacher asked all students to look for the error and to correct it together.Group B: All the mistakes on shape, strokes and proportion were pointed out by the teacher, sometimes orally while checking the students' writing in class and sometimes marking the mistakes in the homework or dictation.

Assessment results
All students who regularly attended the class in both groups passed the assessments in the period when the class was observed, though a notable increase of writing speed and improvement of character quality could be seen in group B.

Opinions and attitude of students
Students were asked to write a reflection at the end of week 4 and week 8 about their learning experiences, including their opinions about the teaching methods, how much time they spend in learning Chinese per week, difficulties they encounter, progress they have made and overall attitude towards the course.At week 4, the reflection showed no big difference between two groups.One of the common difficulties mentioned by students was the characters, but most of them remained positive that they would be able to master them one day.However, at week 8, differences of students' attitude towards their own progress in characters could be noticed between group A and B. Students from group A still demonstrated strong interest and confidence in learning characters since they were accustomed to looking for information themselves while students from group B showed more complaints with 15 out of 25 mentioning that they might not have enough time to practice the characters and doubted whether they could learn to write the characters someday.

Discussion
The teaching results of both groups can be considered a success because the general objectives of the course were attained and most of the students understood the required knowledge as shown in the assessments and had a positive opinion towards both courses.However, it is easy to observe that there are great differences in the teaching approaches, which are highlighted by the educational customs and are worth discussing.We do not attempt to point out that the teaching methods of both teachers are representatives of local teachers or teachers of Chinese nationality.The observation allows us to analyze ways that can guide the teaching of Chinese characters and their advantages respectively.Throughout the courses we can see that two aspects of character were developed: ability to read and write and knowledge about reading and writing.The Chinese teacher in group B put a remarkable emphasis on the development of writing skills, sought to achieve the course objectives stated in terms of language acquisition and did not explicitly show the focus on the development of cross-cultural communication abilities, cultural knowledge or learning techniques, while the Mexican teacher in group A put more attention on knowledge about the characters themselves and the ability to analyze them, taking her own learning experience as a reference.
In terms of foreign language acquisition a clear distinction has been made between language learning and language acquisition (Krashen, 1984), since metalinguistic knowledge is not so useful in developing students' communicative capacities as constant communication (including reception and production) of comprehensible messages in the target language.Although acquisition of the writing system follows very distinct mechanisms from those of spoken language, this communicative approach can be effective in reading and writing for several reasons.The memorization and recognition of characters is a process that requires constant practice.The brain should be able to access information on the shape of the characters and the procedure to write them at a relatively high speed.This process can be trained by means of continuous writing, like the teacher did in group B through repetition tasks and by writing characters on the board slowly while pronouncing the sound of the character with the students following her.In this way, students tried to reinforce the connection between the movements, the image of the character and its sound or meaning in their brains by means of Hebbian learning, in which signals that are triggered simultaneously or sequentially in the brain are reinforced, increasing the possibility to repeat the signal sequence in the future.This kind of training was completed during the learning of some characters in group B, where the learning of characters managed to keep pace with that of spoken language, and characters were written with great care in aesthetic aspects and with higher speed.However, a problem emerged as students progressed in the study of the language as can be seen in group B students' reflection at the end of week 8: 60% of the students mentioned the problem of study time, saying that they probably would not have enough time for practice in the future.
The time problem in the study of characters is a fundamental problem and there have been experts who for this reason consider that the ability of handwriting is not imperative in the study of Chinese and Japanese because of the time it takes and the electronic tools that are currently available (Allen, 2008).It is a principal problem in the repetition-based teaching techniques as those analyzed in group B. Although the pace of progress in the spoken language of the first level is slow owing to the study of pronunciation and basic grammars, the students feel that they do not have sufficient time even to only memorize the most used characters.This strongly discourages students who have learned Chinese for only two months as can be seen in their comments.The teacher of group A focused more on learning knowledge about writing and acquiring skills to learn and recognize characters.Although it is clear that the main purpose of this knowledge is to obtain writing skills, the teacher did not spend too much time in or out of class on the practice of characters.However, the students achieved similar results to those in group B. There may be several reasons.First, the students are adults who know the way they learn effectively.Second, they have the ability to copy characters or make strokes since everyone knows how to write in Spanish.The training in stroke direction or copying characters may be more applicable to children who do not yet master the use of a pencil, but for adults who have limited time and know how to write, it does not necessarily need to spend so much time on this kind of practice or orientation.
The knowledge imparted by the Mexican teacher did not directly help the students understand more words but arouse their interest and intention in details, linking characteristics of the characters to something with which the students are more familiar such as the Maya writing that is more close to students' life since it was introduced in primary education in Mexico.In addition, the rest of the information concerning characters were presented and discussed by the students themselves, making the class an active place of conversation where students could discuss history, their problem in searching information and even joke with one another.It helps to reduce classroom stress and is beneficial for language acquisition in both oral skills (Philips, 1992) and writing skills (Rai, Loschky, Harris, Peck, & Cook, 2010).The use of additional resources in group A encouraged students to be independent in their learning, which is conducive in language learning since the amount of information and skills to learn is high and one cannot depend totally on teachers, particularly in the teaching of Chinese in Mexico where class time is limited and class size is big, making it difficult for teachers to give individual attention.
The discussion among peers and use of their own resources are methods that accord with constructivist principles of education which have demonstrated efficiency in knowledge transfer and motivation (Schunk, 2012).They are fundamental in character learning that requires analytical skills and a longer learning time than many other writing systems even if students only try to obtain reading skills.In this way the teacher of group A played the role of facilitator, orientating discussions while the students helped each other to understand the difficult parts of characters, creating a scaffolding structure to achieve utmost learning, according to Vygotskyan theories of social learning (1978).
Another factor that affects the motivation and perception of the difficulty of characters for the students lies in the pressure to master a correct form of writing.The teacher in group B paid great attention to see if the characters were as correct as possible, directing students' attention to even aesthetic details of the characters.In addition, she exerted pressure on the weekly dictation, in which students always scored low.The dictation and continuous evaluation of results are a highly efficient method to consolidate concepts and abilities in long term memory, surpassing the efficiency of elaboration on concepts in many other cases (Karpicke, 2011).However, this efficiency can only be achieved when the students have already had the knowledge and comprehend it in an efficient manner.In the dictation of group B, many students did not have sufficient time to learn, resulting in bewilderment in their pace of progress.In group A, character exercises were carried out in teams and errors were marked by students themselves without receiving a score, which avoids students from perceiving a high difficulty in the learning process or hurting their self-esteem.
In general the differences between both groups lie in how the teacher perceives the learning of characters based on their own experiences.The Chinese teacher learned the writing system when she was a child and has the knowledge of the language, culture and basic concepts of writing.The reading and writing skills allow her to transcribe what she means to communicate, which takes a long time to obtain.The Mexican teacher has studied a long time in Mexico, learning the spoken language, writing and culture at the same time, thus she believes that students do not necessarily have to spend all their time on practice this ability, and takes practicing characters as an opportunity to relax the class and talk about history and interact with students, which was not the focus of group B. Follow-up research on the use of these two approaches will be useful to identify students' learning outcomes.

Conclusions
The teaching of Chinese writing system can be developed in different ways.However, the system is not only an auxiliary of the language.If it were only a transcription tool, it might have been abandoned a long time ago, since it is a difficult system and takes time to master as can be noticed when students do repetition exercises.The Chinese characters are a fundamental element that gives identity to the language and constitutes a great part of the Asian culture.
Therefore, learning the language is not merely a process of memorization and automation in the process of recognizing and writing the necessary symbols for the purpose of communication.Because of its logographic nature, each symbol and its components can be directly related to concepts at a sub-morphemic level that is not necessarily associated with a sound.The concepts reduce the difficulty in the learning process and help students to understand important elements of Chinese culture and history which in turn can become an additional tool for memorization and creativity in a practical way.The acquisition of this knowledge in the cases analyzed in this article not only helped to arouse students' personal interest in knowing more of this writing system, but was also conducive to reduce the complexity perceived by the students in the writing process.In Latin American countries like Mexico where students usually take a great interest in active class and attend Chinese classes out of interest in learning a new culture, an active learning approach where students learn and comprehend to seek connections with their own knowledge and resources may be more efficient and attractive in the long run. Figure