Insup Taylor

Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese

This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase. Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population. They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin, as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes, often in comparison with English, how the Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy, education, and culture of its users. Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures, Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor, has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies, linguistics, education, psychology) as well as for the general public (parents, business, government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China, Korea and Japan, but mainly about the various writing systems, some exotic, some familar, some simple, some complex, but all fascinating.

Phonological Awareness in Chinese Reading

The nature of phonological awareness (PA), PA tests, and PA training have become important issues in reading instruction involving phonetic writing systems, in particular the English alphabet that has complex letter-sound correspondences. This paper begins by introducing three concepts needed in discussing PA: the nature of PA, of phonetic units, and of writing systems. It then describes how PA is studied in phonetic scripts, i.e., alphabets and syllabaries. Finally it explores how PA applies to reading logographic Chinese characters as well as the phoneticized scripts devised for Chinese. The paper concludes that, in reading and learning to read, PA is less important in Chinese than in English, and that visual skills are more important in Chinese than in English.

Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese: Revised edition

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind. In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest. The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.

Psychology of Literacy: East and West

In this chapter, I discuss largely, though by no means exclusively, Far Eastern literacy. (The Far East will be henceforth referred to simply as “the East.”) And I tend to minimize the relations among literacy, brain, cognition, and culture. Literacy is simply obtaining sound and meaning from printed language; as such, literacy by itself may not have a great influence on cognition and culture. Literacy may have greater influence on cognition and culture, if it serves as “the magic key that unlocks the door to the wonderland of stories and information.” And, as I will argue, cortical activities are similar whether one reads in an Eastern or Western script.

Scripts and reading research

The paper describes four writing systems and a few example scripts under each system. Under the heading “Research Common to Different Scripts,” the paper then discusses research on phonetic coding, eye movements in reading, and cortical processing, in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. Under the heading “Research Unique to Specific Scripts,” it discusses research on word recognition in English orthography, in Japanese Kanji and Kana, and in Korean Hangul. Linguistic, cognitive, and cortical processing seems to be similar for people reading sentences and text in different scripts; processing seems to be dissimilar for people recognizing individual symbols in different scripts.