Pinyin and Childrens Phonological Awareness for K-1 Mandarin learners By Fan ZHENG

The importance of Pinyin Its true that when we talk about reading in Chinese, the Chinese most of the time we refer to Chinese characters . Chinese is an non-alphabetic language. Characters will be the only thing you see in books, magazine, journals, movie subtitles, if its not intentionally designed for language learners or beginning learners. Then the question is why do we need to learn Pinyin if we are going to just read in characters and write in characters?

Now lets take a look of the first part of the question. Are kids going to just read in Characters eventually? The answer is YES! However, for second language learners, there is good news. There are tons of different Pinyin converting software that can easily convert characters into Pinyin. Giving an example, the sentence means I love you. in English. Kids who have learned Mandarin might forget the meaning of each character. So he/she can copy the sentence to the following website: http://www.purpleculture.net/chinese-pinyinconverter/. Then it will come up with the Pinyin for the each character with tone marks by pressing convert. (see Picture1) . Now by sound out the characters in Pinyin w i n correctly, it will remind them what each character and the sentence means. Therefore, even if a kid received an email in all characters and they are not so good at recognizing them, they can still figure out the idea by the help of Pinyin. Now you might argue that the characters might not be online, and maybe he/she is reading a paper book in characters. What about checking the paper dictionary? No, its too much work. People still need to know the radicals or Pinyin in order to

check the dictionary. Yes, now we can use the online Character input dictionary. For instance, by drawing the character with mouse in the box, the will character appear for you to choose. Then we can just simply click the character we want to check and find out it means love and pronounce as i. You can see how it works in Picture 2. Therefore, they now can take notes of the pronunciation and meaning. As we can see above, for second language learners, Pinyin is such a wonderful tool even one can only recognize a very limited amount of characters. Picture 1:

Picture 2

The second part of the question is why do we need to learn Pinyin if we are going to write in characters? Thats true. When people communicate with each other, we will write characters instead of Pinyin. When we write on the paper, we need to write stroke by strokes (stroke is the

smallest component of characters). However, as the technology developed, we barely use handwrite letters to communicate with each other. It has been replaced by email, text message, Skype, Facebook, word document, Powerpoint, excel, etc. All these, we just need use the input system to show the characters. Now there are two most popular input systems, one is by writing stroke by strokes using letters on the keyboard (each letter represents certain stroke). Another one, which most people adopt, is to type Pinyin and choose the character they need. If you want to type love, you can just type ai and it will show dozens of characters with ai in same or different tones. Now you just need to choose the one that means love. Then the problem comes what if he/she is not so good at character recognition which means he/she knows how to pronounce the word correct, but dont know which one to choose. Still, there is fantastic typing website which aides in typing Chinese with meaning (see Picture 3). In this case, Pinyin is the most vital part in writing Chinese today. Picture 3:

The Importance of Phonological Awareness There is always argument about whether or not to introduce Pinyin but merely characters to second language learners. Yet according to research, it has been found that second language learners learn Chinese with assistance of Pinyin three times faster than they learn Chinese

starting from characters and without Pinyin. (Wang, 2010) Therefore, my belief is to introduce Pinyin as early as I can and associate the visual character form with its pronunciation in later reading acquisition. It might be too confusing for the kids to enhance both tonal level and phonemic level at the same time at the very beginning, so my main focus is on the phoneme part.

The Teaching of Pinyin

Website for Parents: In Chinese, each character corresponds to one syllable. There are three elements of a Chinese initial, final and tone. I created a website for the parents, which might better help their kids in learning Mandarin. I organize the website by following titles: Website: http://pinyin.wikispaces.com/ What is Pinyin? All 21 Initials All 35 Finals All 413 Syllables in Pinyin Tongue Twisters Pinyin Songs from YouTube

For 21 initials, I copy the key of pronunciation for English speakers and link the website which kids can hear the pronunciation at home. And 35 finals are divided into three groups six simple finals, thirteen compound finals and sixteen nasal finals. That is also the order how I teach Pinyin, from six simple ones, to thirteen compound finals which are formed only by six

simple finals, an then to sixteen nasal finals which combines the simple or compound vowels with the nasal ending -n and ng. As for all the 413 syllables in Pinyin, there are 26 groups, according to combination sort by the initials. Finally, the tongue twisters I found and translated are good for practicing some difficult pronunciations in Pinyin, such as c, z, ui, etc. I will corporate the tongue twisters with the lesson as warm-ups when kids finish learning Pinyin.

Pinyin and Curriculum Words The following are the tables I developed for teaching Pinyin using the curriculum words in level one in our school district. By focusing on particular characters in the context, it will be more meaningful for the students, because what is taught should be directly usable in childrens reading( Stahl, 1992, p622).

21+y/w initials: Initial b p m f d t n l g k h j q x z c s Word in Pinyin b b wi p m m fn d di t ni ni ln s e k h ji jie q x u zi c su s Word in Character English meaning Father Grandma mom-side Mother Wind Little brother Kick play Grandmar dad-side Blue Big brother Class Drink Big sister Seven Watermelon at in on Bathroom Four Topic Family Family Family Nature Family Sports Family Colors Family School Schedule Drink Family Numbers Fruits Family School Numbers

r zh ch sh y w

rn zh ch sh y w

Person Measure word dog cat pig etc. Eat Ten One Five

Nationality Animals Food Numbers Numbers Numbers

16 compound finals +er Compound Finals ai ei ao ou ia ie iao iu (iou) ua uo uai ui (uei) e *er 16 nasal finals Nasal Finals an en ang eng ong ian iang in ing iong Word in Pinyin ln s w men zn me yn ln ln yn s lin jn tin yn wn yu yn Word in Character English meaning Blue We How Cold Dragon Color Two Today English Swimming Topic color family Weather Weather Animals Colors Numbers Time School schedule Sports Word in Pinyin i hi s mo yu ji y ye yo li hu hu hu kui hu yu lin r Word in Character English meaning Love Black Cat have Family/home Grandpadadside Want Six Drawing Fire Fast Can Moon Two Topic Family Colors Animals Family Family Family Food Numbers Sports Nature Sports Sports Nature Numbers

uan un (uen) uang ueng an n (en)

wn wn hun s wn yun yn

Play Ask Yellow Sound of bees Circle/round cloud

Sports Verbs Colors Animals Shapes Nature

Useful Activities: a. ColorsMake it clear visually which one is initial and which one is final by using different color of pen. E.g. w i n I love you will be w i n. After the reading, we can ask the kids to color the initials or finals using two different colors. b. Big booksMaking a series of big books for the kids using the curriculum words, and at the same time address some particular highly used initials or finals in each book. E.g. Animal book: zhe shi yi zhi zhu(this is a pig), zhe shi yi zhi gou (this is a dog), zhe shi yi zhi mao( this is a cat), zhe shi yi zhi tu zi (This is a bunny). This book focus on the initial zh and sh. After reading together with the kids, they are going to fill in with some blanks and make their own mini-books. So far, I have made three books- animal, food, and sports. c. Tongue twisters find or invent tongue twisters to address particular initials or finals in learning Pinyin. I put all the tongue twisters I found on the Pinyin website I created. For example, the following is for practicing sh and si. sh sh sh s sh s Ten is ten, four is four. sh s sh sh s Fourteen is fourteen, s sh sh s sh Forty is forty. sh s b sh s sh Fourteen is not forty.

s sh b sh sh s Forty is not fourteen. d. Encourage writing If the phonetic instruction is successful in English, then the it will influence the instruction in Chinese. For instance, the student may spell cat as mou instead of mao. If we encourage kids to write down the words, they we can compare the spelling in Pinyin with the one in English, so that kids will be more impressed after correction. e. Making words (Cunningham, 2011, p208) using the pocket chart, there are different games that we can change into teaching words in Pinyin in Cunninghams book, such as finding the secret words. f. Listening Practice Since Chinese initials and finals has no variation on the sound, we can prepare dictation or circling practice for the kids. For younger kids, choosing the right sound might be easier than writing them down. g. Initial and final separation game pick three students in the class and show them Pinyin of a character. The first student need to sound out the initial, the second student need to sound out the final, and the last student need to sound out the whole pronunciation of the character. The group gets point if they make no mistake.

Conclusion: I benefit a lot from this project. It not only can be used to teach K-1, but all grade levels. For example, the three tables can be a checklist for level one students at high school as well. Also, by doing this project, I have more clear idea of how to teach Pinyin to second language learners in U.S. and how students can benefit for their whole life.

Reference: Cunningham, P. M. (2011). Best practices in teaching phonological awareness and phonics. In L. M. Morrow & L. B. Gambrell (Eds.), Best practices in literacy instruction (4th ed., pp. 199-223). New York: Guilford Press.

McKenna, M. C., & Stahl, K. A. (2009). Assessment for reading instruction, second edition. New York: Guilford Press.

Stahl, S. A. (1992). Saying the P word: Nine guidelines for exemplary phonics instruction. The Reading Teacher, 45(8), 618625.
Wang, H. (2008). Coexistence of Traditional and Simplified Chinese Character in Singapore. Wenhsun, 271(5), 75-78.