| Theories of Second Language Acquisition proclaim that appropriate instruction and strategy training facilitate and accelerate the process of second language acquisition. Psycholinguistic studies have found that morphological structure, which is part of the mental lexicon, plays a role in word learning and is related directly to vocabulary learning and reading achievement. Chinese is a language written in morphemic characters, and its words are mostly compounds. The purpose of this work is to present an appropriate pedagogy to teach L2 (second language) learners Chinese words. First, a series of investigations which contained surveys, tests and interviews was completed. It was found that native Chinese speakers usually can adopt the knowledge of character radicals and word structure to get the meanings of unfamiliar words in their L1 easily and effectively, but L2 learners of Chinese cannot. This indicates that L2 learners need knowledge related to Chinese word structure and character radicals and also training in proper strategies. In order to guide L2 learners to study new words more effectively, the general rules of Chinese words and word structure are analyzed and presented as the second part of this work. Finally, a systematic vocabulary pedagogy is discussed and presented on the basis of the study results in previous parts. At the elementary Chinese level, teach L2 learners core words, basic character radicals and the knowledge of character structure; meanwhile, train them to use the knowledge of character structure and radicals to recognize and memorize words. At the intermediate level, teach learners the knowledge of word structure and related rules, train them to use such knowledge and contextual information to learn new words by themselves. At the advanced level, teach L2 learners lower-frequency words and lexical phrases, and at the same time, train students to use different strategies properly to learn a large number of words and to produce words in a native-like way by sufficient language interactions. |
