Teaching Culture through Language: Exploring Metaphor and Metonymy in Chinese Characters
Year: 2015
Type: article
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: Learners of Mandarin Chinese often find reading and writing Chinese characters extremely challenging. This study proposes a holistic approach that is anchored in the theoretic framework of Cognitive Linguistics to teaching Chinese characters for reading/writing by explicitly heightening learners’ awareness of the cultural knowledge encoded in the radicals and characters. Radicals are keys to learning characters as they are a vital clue to the meaning of a word and help compose compound characters. Traditional ways of organizing and teaching radicals are in accordance with the number of strokes they have. However, the proposed approach organizes radicals by way of concepts that reflect the folk categories speakers of Chinese share. Learners were also taught how conceptual metaphor and metonymy motivate the formation of radicals and compound words. Twenty-nine international students at a university in Taiwan participated in the study. A survey was administered after 6 weeks of treatment yielding results that are favorable to the approach. It was also found that such an approach may not suit all learners depending on their prior knowledge.
Author: Ying-hsueh Hu
Institution: Tamkang University
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1600344661