From 65438 to 0983, Professor Zeng published the article "Easy to Learn and Use Chinese Characters", which had a wide and far-reaching impact on pedagogy, linguistics and Chinese information coding. Japanese TV station specially invited relevant experts to hold a special discussion on the reform of Chinese characters. Participants believe that both those who are in favor of and against the text reform can learn from it. Mr. Zhou Youguang, a famous expert on character reform, said: "Zeng Wen broke the long-term centralization of Chinese characters." The so-called viewpoint is that "Chinese characters are complicated in strokes and characters, and difficult to learn, recognize, remember, read, write and use". Professor Zeng, on the other hand, thinks that words with more strokes are easier to identify because of more clues (redundant information), although it takes a little more time to write. As far as words are concerned, the number of words in different languages is roughly the same. The Oxford Dictionary receives 600,000 words, but Chinese words are just that. The experimental results show that Chinese characters are easy to learn, understand and write in English, Japanese pseudonyms and Chinese Pinyin because of their high redundant information. It takes up less space and is economical and practical. Therefore, Chinese characters are a long and beautiful writing, which records and conveys splendid Chinese culture and is a family heirloom of the Chinese nation.
Professor Tseng Sing Chu used information theory to set up the course "Psychology of Chinese Characters". With regard to the nature and achievements of this research, Yang Guixin (China Education News1995165438+12nd edition on October 22nd) commented in an article commemorating Liao Yifan: "Praise him for implementing the Party's policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and making efforts to do a good job in educational research. 1982 In the second half of the year, this magazine received a spontaneous manuscript, Chinese Characters Easy to Learn and Use, which was more than 20,000 words long. Even though it used rich scientific experimental materials and made a careful comparison with various pinyin characters, it fully certified that "Chinese characters have a long history, beautiful fonts, easy to learn and write, and are economical and effective", and it should not be abolished at all. This is very important. The writer Tseng Sing Chu was wrongly classified as Rightist. What should I do? Published or not published? The editors handed this manuscript to Comrade Yifan. After reading it carefully, he did not hesitate to issue it, and immediately assigned the task to the editors: organizing all kinds of contending manuscripts, especially those of cultural reform and language experts, and seriously discussing them. At the beginning of 1983, Educational Research serialized Chinese Characters for Learning in two phases, which aroused strong repercussions at home and abroad. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is a "sensational effect". Later, the National People's Congress solemnly decided to rename the National Character Reform Committee as the Language and Character Working Committee, and no longer mentioned the road of pinyin of Chinese characters, which has an important relationship with the educational research and publication of Tseng Sing Chu's Certificate for Learning and Using Chinese Characters. "
1In July, 1983, Professor Zeng was invited to participate in the "International Symposium on China Language" held in Hongkong, and read out the paper "Comparison between Square Characters and Alphabetic Characters", which was well received by representatives from Japan, the United States, Canada and other countries.
Professor Tseng Sing Chu did an experiment about children's early literacy in 1980s. Teach Chinese characters to infants under one year old who can't speak by programming and operating conditioned reflex (pointing with fingers, matching words with pictures or objects, or matching pictures and objects with words, listening to sounds and braille, learning Chinese and English by contrast, expressing words with actions and words, etc.). ) Not only can children know Chinese characters, but also can children learn related English words in the process of knowing Chinese characters, and at the same time, they can also use Chinese characters to know unfamiliar pictures. Experiments show that babies can learn to recognize hundreds of Chinese characters before speaking. Generally speaking, children aged 2 to 4 can learn 2000 or 3000 Chinese characters in two periods (15 to 20 minutes) every day. Professor Zeng's method of teaching infants who can't speak to read has been adopted by St. Louis College for the Deaf in the United States to teach deaf people to read and write.
At the same time, Professor Tseng Sing Chu also did an experiment about children's early arithmetic. First of all, teach children the special cases of self-addition, self-subtraction, self-multiplication and self-division, and teach them by multiplication or division of numbers (let children understand that multiplication is continuous addition, except continuous subtraction). Children can count but not necessarily, so they must provide all kinds of objects, such as abacus, building blocks, coins and so on. Candy ... makes children have the concept of cardinal number (number representing the number of things) for things of different shapes and sizes, which can help children understand the meaning from number (shǔ) to number (sh ǔ).) Professor Tseng Sing Chu uses a special square board, with two vertical and horizontal feet intersecting at right angles, and teaches children to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division at the same time. The key is to let children learn the carry and abdication of multi-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. From concrete arithmetic situation to abstract arithmetic situation, and then back to practical application, create situations in the form of games (learning piano and practicing calligraphy and painting) to make it easier for children to master the four operations. In such a learning situation, Piaget's development stage did not appear.
Professor Gardner of Harvard University wrote an article in Psychology Today 1980. The main ideas are as follows: I had many conversations and discussions with Professor Tseng Sing Chu of East China Normal University in Shanghai and Boston, and watched his learning and development videos. It is found that the results of his ingenious method (combining operant conditioning and information analysis to identify Chinese characters, English words and poems) are different from those of the development stage (maintaining balance, perceptual activities, low-level operations and high-level operations, etc.). ) mentioned by Professor Piaget of Switzerland. The last three stages are much ahead of schedule, and children around the age of three or four can do complex operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with pen calculation or mental calculation, which means that children at the age of three or four already have the ability of abstract operation, which is the other way around to some extent.