聲旁表音多媒體教學輔助軟體對國小中年級低識字量學童識字能力之成效

Efficacy of multimedia phonetic radical training for elementary school students with poor reading ability

本研究旨在探討結合統計學習與集中識字教學法的電腦輔助教學軟體「收割季節」，對國小中年級低識字量學童在中文識字表現之影響。閱讀習得是一種統計學習的過程。隨著接觸文字的經驗增加，孩童掌握使用文字來傳達語音表徵的規則。收割季節運用統計學習的原則，以聲旁為集中識字教學之主軸，選擇高表音一致性的中文字為教學目標字，使學童在遊戲過程中，透過視覺與聽覺同步即時回饋，系統性地經驗到聲旁可組成的形聲字與其發音的變化，進而建立聲旁表音的形音對應關係。低識字量學童依其識字量與智力表現分為兩組，對照組僅接受學校的日常教學，實驗組則額外接受收割季節的教學介入。針對聲旁表音測驗、教學形聲字唸名測驗、識字量評估測驗的前後測表現，進行二因子混合設計變異數分析。發現在各項表現上都有顯著的二因子顯著交互作用。單純主要效果結果顯示，實驗組在聲旁表音測驗、教學形聲字唸名測驗、識字量評估測驗的後測正確率表現均顯著優於前測表現；在教學形聲字唸名測驗的後測流暢性表現也顯著優於前測表現。未接受教學介入的控制組學童，其前、後測表現則未有顯著差異。實驗組學童從使用收割季節的遊戲過程中，察覺聲旁的表音特性以及中文形音對應之間的關係，習得中文聲旁覺知的後設知識，進而增進其閱讀正確率與流暢性表現。本研究結果支持統計學習在閱讀習得過程扮演重要的角色。未來在教材編寫、課程設計與遊戲軟體研發上可運用統計學習的原則，將有助提升閱讀表現。

Rationale & Purpose: This study investigated the effectiveness of Harvest Festival, an interactive game based on the principle of statistical learning, in facilitating children’s acquisition of Chinese characters. Research has demonstrated that learners can pick up the statistical structure of elements from auditory or visual inputs, including their distribution, frequency, and co-occurrence probability. Statistical learning plays a crucial role in various aspects of language acquisition, from word segmentation, phonological and orthographic awareness, to syntactic learning. Reading acquisition is a process that involves understanding how orthographic forms represent speech. Orthographic transparency varies across writing systems. However, psycholinguistic grain size theory posits that, in general, learning to read is a statistical learning process that aims to find the optimal mapping consistency and shared grain size between phonology and orthography. Chinese is often classified as a logographic writing system. Chinese characters, the basic writing unit, are composed of radicals and map onto a single-syllable morpheme rather than a phoneme in the spoken language. Corpus analysis indicates that approximately 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms (i.e.,踩, /cai3/,“to step on”), combining a semantic radical (i.e.,足, /zu2/,“foot”) and a phonetic radical (i.e.,采, /cai3/,“gathering”) to provide clues regarding each character’s meaning and pronunciation. Studies on Chinese reading acquisition have used phonetic consistency to reflect the reliability of phonetic radicals in providing pronunciation clues for their phonograms. Many studies have evidenced the consistency effect on Chinese word recognition, indicating that Chinese characters are learned through a universal statistical learning mechanism. For example,搖/yao2/ has six orthographic neighbors, namely鷂,瑤,遙,徭,傜, and謠. These neighbors are“friends”of搖because they have the same pronunciation. Similarly,流/liu2/ has five orthographic neighbors. However, only two of these neighbors, that is,琉/liu2/ and硫/liu2/ but not梳/shu1/,疏/shu1/, or毓/yu4/, are“friends”of流. Therefore, characters such as搖and their orthographic neighbors are referred to as high-consistency characters (consistency index = 1). In contrast, characters such as流,琉, and硫are referred to as low-consistency characters (consistency index = 0.33). Behavioral studies have demonstrated the consistency effect in naming Chinese characters, with high-consistency characters named more quickly and accurately than low-consistency characters, particularly low-frequency characters. Moreover, the consistency effect was mainly found in phonograms with large orthographic neighborhoods. Tzeng and Lee (2012) explored the developmental trajectories through which children acquire orthographic knowledge of Chinese phonetic radicals. These results revealed that the consistency effect emerged in fourth-graders in reading and supported that repeated exposure to a phonetic radical and its associated pronunciations is essential for developing the metalinguistic knowledge for reading Chinese. However, approximately 2% to 10% of children struggle to learn to read Chinese. Harvest Festival, modified from the What-A-Male game, is designed to help children acquire the mapping between phonogram and the phonetic radical. In each training session, a target phonetic radical, selected from a Chinese psycholinguistic database, is presented at the top of the screen. Chinese phonograms either carry with this target phonetic radical or not would pop out on the screen. Players would hear the character’s pronunciation and be asked to click on those phonograms with the target phonetic radical as quickly as possible, regardless of whether they knew them. The players received immediate and accurate feedback during the interactive process and received repeated exposure to a set of phonetic radicals and their associated pronunciations. To evaluate the effectiveness of Harvest Festival, third- and fourth-grade students with poor reading ability were invited to participate in the current study. Only half of these students received training for 8 weeks. Tests for Chinese reading proficiency were conducted before and after training. The study predicted that the children who received Harvest Festival training would enhance their metalinguistic understanding of the statistical properties of Chinese phonetic radicals, including radical position and phonetic consistency, which would improve their performance on related assessments. Methods: 40 third- and fourth-grade students with normal intelligence but ranking below the 25th percentile in the Assessment of Chinese Character Lists (Hung et al., 2006a) participated in this study. These students were divided into experimental and control groups by matching their reading ability. The two groups continued to receive their standard daily school instruction, but the experimental group received additional Harvest Festival training for 8 weeks (three sessions per week, 5 minutes per session). To evaluate the effectiveness of the Harvest Festival on Chinese character learning, both groups were administered a set of tests, including the phonetic radical test (Hung et al., 2007), the Self-developed test to measure the target characters’reading accuracy and fluency, the Assessment of Chinese Character Lists (Hung et al., 2006a) and the Assessment of Sight-Word Reading and Fluency (Hung et al., 2006b) in the pre- and post-training. Findings: Two-way mixed-design analysis of variance (groups: experimental and control; time: pretest and posttest) was conducted to evaluate the changes in the students’reading performance before and after training. Significant interaction effects between group and time were found in the phonetic radical test, self-developed test, and Assessment of Chinese Character Lists, which revealed differences in accuracy. The significant interaction effect was also identified in reading fluency on the self-developed test. Post hoc analysis revealed that the significant difference observed in reading performance before and after training only occurred in the experimental group. Conclusions/Implementations: Our findings that the experimental group revealed significant training effects in reading performance suggest that the Harvest Festival effectively enhances reading performance. After eight weeks of training, children with poor reading ability acquired the metalinguistic knowledge of Chinese phonetic radicals and the relationship between phonetic radicals and characters. With sufficient exposure to the phonetic radical and the associated pronunciations, children gradually enable automatization in decoding and thus enhance reading fluency. This study demonstrates that statistical learning is crucial in language acquisition, especially for children with poor reading ability. Future curriculum design and computer-based instruction should incorporate the principles of statistical learning into teaching practices.