Future Trends in Chinese Character Teaching: Use of Embodiment and Technologies in Classrooms

The purpose of the article is to argue that the future trends of teaching Chinese characters should and will emphasize the use of embodied cognition and computer technologies in classrooms. We first compare the differences between CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language) by revealing the unique nature of Chinese characters. We then review and synthesize current literature on embodied cognition and use of technologies in a language classroom. We provide the argument that teachers should implement embodiment and technologies in classrooms for student’s better Chinese character learning. We further discuss practical implications and propose possible future research directions. Purpose of the Study One of the most challenging and difficult human languages in the world is Chinese. As estimated by Ethnologue: Language of the World (Lewis, 2009), Chinese is currently the most widely spoken language in the world, with more than 845 million native speakers, or over 1200 million native and second language speakers combined. For most of the English speaking people, however, many people believe that Chinese is the toughest language to learn (Abraham, 2009; Moser, 1991), probably due to its irregular morphology and unsystematic morphophonemics (Everson, 1998). Though Chinese, as a macrolanguage coded zho, has 13 significantly different individual languages or dialects (Lewis, 2009) under the international language code ISO 639-3 (SIL International), the writing system of Chinese uses the same characters across all of these languages. These Chinese characters, or Hanji, are nonalphabetic orthographic words that are formed and written in a specific format. The purpose of the article is to provide evidence to support our argument that future trends of teaching Chinese characters will rely on the use of embodied cognition and computer technologies in classrooms. We review related literature and believe that since there are a lot of differences between CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), teachers should acquire and develop certain pedagogical content knowledge in order to best teach how to listen, speak, read, and write Chinese. As we focus on Chinese character teaching, we propose that when teachers implement the use of embodied cognition and the use of technologies in a language classroom, students will learn better. We further discuss practical implications and possible future research directions. Language Acquisition and L2 Learning Language can be viewed as an organized means of word combinations for use of human communication (Sternberg & Ben-Zeev, 2001). From a cognitive viewpoint, a language is a system that encodes and decodes information, and reaches the purpose of human communication. Many researchers mutually agree upon six principal properties of language: “communicative; arbitrarily symbolic; regularly structured; structured at multiple levels; productive; and evolving” (Brown, 1965; Clark & Clark, 1977; Clucksberg & Dank, 1975; cited in Sternberg & Ben-Zeev, 2001, p 197). Language is communicative because it allows people to transmit ideas with others who share the same language. The arbitrarily symbol of a language can refer to a certain thing, idea, thought, or