Exploring the Effectiveness and Impacts of Teaching Intervention in Chinese Learning

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of teaching intervention for Chinese learners, who were English speakers who tended to focus on phonemic awareness, in learning Chinese. It also tried to examine the impacts of Chinese phonological and morphological awareness on their English language development. The study was conducted in classrooms for third graders from an elementary school in Beijing. The intervention of Chinese program was implemented for a whole year. The morphology-related instruction was adopted in the experimental class, and tradition Chinese teaching instruction was used in the control class. Results showed that students’ reading proficiency (including character reading and sentence reading) in experimental class was significantly higher than the one in control class, which suggested that the teaching intervention was effective and successful in improving these learners’ Chinese reading proficiency, and they made a great progress after one year Chinese learning. Chinese radical awareness was a significant contributor to their English comprehension and could predict their English development. Pedagogical implications for promoting English speakers’ Chinese learning were provided.