Chinese Characters in the Mind

A Radical-Based Teaching Approach

Abstract

This study aims to provide an efficient way of developing radical awareness which contributes to Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners’ acquisition of Chinese characters, by investigating the differences between English and Chinese word recognition. It introduces the characteristics of Chinese orthography in terms of the history, formation, and orthographic units. It also compares the Chinese writing system with alphabetic writing systems. The differences between them lead us to the assumption that Chinese word recognition differs from English word recognition. By examining Chinese and English word recognition models, we conclude the main distinctions which cause English readers’ difficulties in learning Chinese characters: 1) Great visual complexity and non-linear structures of Chinese characters; 2) the constituent levels in Chinese and English word recognition have different amount of units that encode distinctive information; 3) sub-lexical information is provided by radicals; 4) no grapheme-phoneme corre-spondence exists in Chinese; the phonological mapping from phonetic radical to sound in Chinese is less reliable than the mapping from letter to sound in English; 5) the lack of morphological cues in Chinese. The distinctions as well as other evidences from neuroimaging, eye movement and working memory, imply that a good understanding of radicals is the key to overcome the difficulties. The role of radicals in Chinese character recognition is further illustrated in terms of the fre-quency, function and position, by means of the findings from the experimental studies on native and non-native Chinese speakers. The discussion of radical awareness development among CFL learners indicates the significant role of radi-cal knowledge and radical knowledge application in teaching and learning Chinese characters, especially at the pre-intermediate level. Furthermore, considering the current situation of Chinese character teaching, we anticipate that this situation can be improved by integrating interactive computer-based didactics. Thus, a rad-ical-based e-learning demo is created, in order to demonstrate the strategy of de-veloping radical awareness among CFL learners.

Keywords

Chinese Characters, Word Recognition, Radical, Character Learning, CFL Learners, Radical Awareness, E-Learning

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