The role of morphological awareness in the incidental learning of Chinese characters among CSL learners

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the role of morphological awareness in the incidental learning of Mandarin Chinese characters among Chinese as second language (CSL) learners. Participants of the study were 20 college-level international students, uniformly Thai in language background, enrolled to study CSL at Southwest University, Chongqing, China. The research questions were investigated through two experiments, one administered to measure their L2 morphological proficiency in Chinese and the other to pinpoint the overall contribution of morphological awareness in incidental Chinese character learning through extensive reading as well as how such a contribution may vary when different dimensions of word knowledge are concerned. The results indicate that while higher L2 language proficiency can in general correspond to higher L2 morphological awareness, which in turn benefits the incidental learning of new words, morphological awareness plays a stronger and more explicit role in facilitating the incidental Chinese character learning for intermediate learners relative to advanced learners. In addition, intermediate learners, compared to advanced learners, tend to rely more heavily on character-internal and orthographical information when learning novel characters.

KEYWORDS:

• Morphological awareness
• incidental learning
• second language acquisition
• Chinese as second language

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the anonymous referees as well as the editors of Language Awareness for their valuable comments made on the earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yanhui Zhang

Yanhui Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on cognitive models of language acquisition, technology-enhanced second language learning, corpus linguistics, and quantitative methods in languages research.

Ruyu Li

Ruyu Li is a Chinese language and culture instructor at Foreign Service Institute, Arlington, VA, USA. Prior to this, she was a Chinese language instructor at Diplomatic Language Service. Her main research interests include second language pedagogy and cognitive process in second language reading.