Text Scaffolding
The text in our children's stories appears in a format developed exclusively by LCEP called Text Scaffolding, or, Scaffolded Text, which shows relationships between:
- Simplified Chinese characters: jiǎnhuàzì = 简化字, also known as jiǎntǐzì = 简体字, at the top. (as opposed to Traditional Chinese characters: zhèngtǐzì = 正体字, also known as fántǐzì = 繁体字)
- Pinyin = Pīnyīn = 拼音 (meaning: to spell sound), in the middle, and
- English words = Yīngyǔ dāncí = 英语单词, at the bottom
The following figures show how Text Scaffolding aligns the words depending on certain grammatical situations:
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
When specific vocabulary words do not translate perfectly/directly but the sentence overall keeps word order the same, the words that have no match in the other language are given their own space. In Figure 2's example, the grammatical word order is the same: the English sentence is a Subject-Verb-Object construction and so is the Chinese. English speakers would say "I am (NAME)" to introduce themselves, using the "be" verb am. But in the Chinese line, the verb jiào = 叫 literally translates to "to be called". So, while the literal translation of the Chinese would be "I am called Byron", it is acceptable to consider it the same as saying "I am Byron".
Figure 3:
When the sentence structure and/or individual word translations differ too greatly between the languages to line them up smoothly, the lines of Chinese and Pinyin text are instead horizontally offset from the corresponding English line and are colour-coded to show which words in both languages relate to one another.
The video👇 illustrates these descriptions with additional visuals and is narrated to assist you in understanding the system. Before you watch the video itself, this is a quick intro explaining how the concept of Text Scaffolding (or Scaffolded Text) came to be in the first place:
Video Introduction for Mandarin Speakers
我很高兴给你们介绍:“Little Byron – 小白任”！这是我自己写的一本双语书。也许你会想，“她为什么写小孩子的中英文书啊？”其实， 我有许多原因， 最重要的是我不想丢掉我的中文。 我还是学生学中文的时候，很遗憾没有很多现代和有意思的阅读材料，所以我决定用我的知识, 创作我自己的好玩儿的资料。我觉得很多的父母想教他们的孩子讲英文或者中文，可是他们发现很多的双语书有许多的缺点。比如， 有些书有英文和汉字， 但是没有拼音。 有些书有汉字和拼音却没有英文。 而且，大多数的双语故事把一种语言放在页面的右边而把地二种语言放在页面的左边， 让看书的人很容易只看一种语言而忽略另外一种语言。 请大家欣赏我的视频了解我如何处理这个问题！ 谢谢你们！
The above video introduction translated from Mandarin into English:
I am very happy to introduce to you: Little Byron - 小白任! This is a bilingual book written by me. You may think, "Why did she write a child's Chinese and English book?" Actually, I have many reasons; the most important thing is that I don't want to lose my Chinese. When I was a student studying Chinese, I regretted that there weren’t many modern and interesting reading materials out there, so I decided to use my knowledge and create my own interesting materials. I think many parents want to teach their children to speak English or Chinese, but they find that many bilingual books have many shortcomings. For example, some books have English and Chinese characters, but no Pinyin. Some books have Chinese characters and Pinyin, but no English. Moreover, most bilingual stories put one language on the right side of the page and the second language on the left side of the page, making it easy for readers to read only one language and ignore the other. Please enjoy my video to learn how I deal with this problem! Thank you all!