Enhancing the effectiveness of Kanji learning for the L1 Chinese -background students through a Sino -Japanese phonological correspondence-based strategy

Previous studies have shown that subjects of logographic backgrounds prefer using a visual-orthographic strategy and perform better when the target language is orthographically deep, while alphabetic background learners appear to be more effective in word recognition and learning where the L2 is orthographically shallow through a phonological strategy. It has been established that L1 Chinese learners, in general, rely heavily on a visual-based orthographic strategy in processing Japanese Kanji, as their prior knowledge of Chinese Hanzi provides direct access to the meaning of Kanji. For these learners, the phonological recoding strategy traditionally plays a small role in Kanji learning. Their over-reliance on a visual-based strategy, as a result, may cause problems in Japanese reading comprehension when no sufficient visual information is available from Kanji words. Many studies have suggested that the pronunciation of Chinese Hanzi could be used to assist L1 Chinese learners in inferring Japanese Kanji pronunciation. However, no research has empirically documented the effects of Sino-Japanese phonological correspondences on Kanji learning. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to (1) propose an instructional method, (2) examine the effectiveness of the method, and (3) investigate the effects of the method on learners’ strategy use. The proposed instructional method is based on the phonological correspondences between Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji, which allows L1 Chinese learners quickly establish phonetic associations to facilitate their Kanji learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of the method and determine whether L1 Chinese learners would choose a different strategy after exposure to the instructional method, an experiment employing pre- and posttest design with four types of stimuli has been conducted on two groups of participants to examine the progress differences between two tests. These stimuli consisted of Kanji-Kana mixed context sentences with Kanji script options, Kanji-Kana mixed context sentences with Kanji pronunciation options, all-Kana context sentences with Kanji script options, and all-Kana context sentences with Kanji pronunciation options. A follow-up questionnaire was employed to clarify the role of L1 knowledge and to investigate the approaches used by the L1 Chinese background learners in the process of Kanji recognition. Results of this study show that participants who were exposed to the proposed instructional method changed their strategy use of relying mainly on visual-base strategies to use both visual and phonological-based strategies. As a result, these participants had significantly higher gain than those who reading the same but randomly arranged Kanji word list. The results of the present study suggest that the kind of method developed here might have more pedagogical value to L1 Chinese learners and their teachers than previously thought