Applied Dual Coding Theory on Chinese characters teaching in Second Life

Dual Coding Theory (DCT) emphasises the theoretical perspective on learning and teaching sight vocabulary. It relates two specific areas on language cognition; they are verbal encoding and non-verbal encoding, such as imagery (Sadoski, 2005). Compared to English language, Chinese vocabulary was constructed with morphological aspects and represented more meaningful (Norman, 1988). The learning process require the students, especial the foreign language learners, have a good understanding on the meaning of certain Chinese characters. Based on this requirement, the teaching aids on Chinese characters should pay more attention on helping the students to know the words by verbal assistant, and to understand the meaning by using imagery (Shen, 2010).

Second Life provides an ideal platform for both Chinese learners and teachers. It offers an environment where you can re-build some ancient Chinese buildings and living conditions. Students’ imagery ability will be inspired specifically by it. It also gives the users to communicate with each other by speakers.

By listing those benefits, the trial project in SL will be constructed by two parts. In the first part, the teacher will introduce several concrete new vocabularies verbally. The assistant teaching tool in SL will be sending note cards. In the next part, the teacher will ask the students to find those corresponding things in words which have introduced by the teacher at the 1st part. For instance, the Chinese character ‘门’ means ‘door or gate’ in English. The teacher will teach this word ‘门’ first, and then she will ask the students to find a Chinese door in SL. The purpose is to show the students that the Chinese character ‘门’ came from real door in ancient China. With this learning, the students will get an imagery understanding on the word ‘门’. The whole project is based on DCT, and combined by verbal teaching and non-verbal (imagery) learning.



References
Norman, J. (1988). Chinese. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.
Sadoski, M. (2005). A dual coding view of vocabulary learning. Journal of Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21, 221-238. doi: 10.1080/10573560590949359.
Shen, H. H. (2010). Imagery and verbal coding approaches in Chinese vocabulary instruction. Journal of Language Teaching Research, 14(4), 485-499. doi: 10.1177/1362168810375370.