The Matthew Effect of Repeated Writing Practice

• In Event: Written Language Studies Across Culture

Abstract

The goal of this study is to test repeated writing practice supports integration of form, sound and meaning of learned Chinese characters. Theoretically, most important for the question of writing effects on reading, character connections to both phonology and meaning depend crucially on establishing a high quality representation of the written character form. Indeed, some studies suggest that orthographic awareness, rather than phonological awareness, is the most predictive variable for Chinese reading achievement (Chung, et al., 2010; Siok and Fletcher, 2001). Practically, character-writing training was provided in contrast to the alphabetic-code writing training, for consecutive days.
Twenty-seven English-native speakers enrolled in Elementary Chinese at Carnegie Mellon University participated in two experiments. Experiment 1 was designed to examine the learning pattern of Chinese lexical constituents (form, sound and meaning) when characters were introduced through the repeated character writing condition compared with the repeated alphabetic-code writing condition. We assessed learning of the orthographic form, and its links to meaning and pronunciation. Experiment 2 was designed to examine the writing quality pattern of newly taught Chinese when characters were introduced through the repeated character writing condition.
As to the Experiment 1, a pre-test was given before learning started on the first day of training to make sure that none of the 90 characters were known. Participants learned 60 characters in all, with 30 appearing in each training condition for 3 days. On each day of training, learning was followed by a testing session that included a lexical decision task, a partial cue-based character-recognition task, a sound matching task, and a meaning matching task. Results suggest, on these four dependent variables, there was a significant main effect of time (Day 1, 2 to 3), and main effect of conditions (writing vs. pinyin writing vs. novel), and time-by-condition interaction.
In Experiment 2, instead of 3 training days, five training days were implemented, only the writing quality was assessed based upon the four-category of coding rubrics. They include two levels of local conformity (Basic Stroke Form Correctness and Radical Correctness), and two levels of global conformity (Conventional Shape and Component Configuration Relations). A 3 (Day) X 3 (Trial) repeated measure ANCOVA was conducted on each of the four dependent variables. by controlling for the stroke awareness scores, there was a significant main effect of day; there was also a significant main effect of trail, with the outcomes in trail 5 better than each of the previous days.
Results suggested that students with higher stroke awareness performed even better on the writing quality, which suggested that stroke awareness builds the foundation for character-writing training. However, this Matthew effect did not appear after repeated writing practice for three days, but began to affect the writing quality after 5-day’s training. This suggested that learners’ innate orthographic/stroke awareness began to play a big role once the integration of the lexical constituent (i.e, sound, meaning and form) of the newly learned Chinese characters were stabilized after enough trails of practices.

Authors

• Charles Perfetti, University of Pittsburgh

• Qun Guan, East China Normal Uniiversity