Using
Radicals in Teaching Chinese Characters to Second Language Learners
M. Taft & K. Chung |
A
study was carried out to determine whether knowledge of the internal
radical structure of a Chinese character helps a naive learner to
memorize that character. Four groups of Australian subjects who knew
nothing about Chinese were asked to learn 24 character/meaning pairs
(e.g., ™ð-GHEW). Each character was composed of two radicals taken
from a set of 16. Every subject was presented with the set of character-meaning
pairs three times and then were given each character alone and asked
to recall the meaning associated with it. Before seeing any characters,
one group (Radicals before) told about radicals and had 15 minutes
to learn the set of 16 radicals thoroughly. Another (Radicals Early)
was told about radicals at the first presentation of the stimuli,
but were simply asked, as each character was presented, to point
out on a chart its component radicals. A third group (Radicals Late)
did the same thing, but at the third presentation of the stimuli;
while a final group (No Radicals) were told nothing about radicals
at all. It was found that memory for the character-meaning pairings
was best for the Radicals Early group, suggesting that it is important
to highlight the radicals when a character is first presented to
the learner. Key words: Chinese characters, radicals, teaching orthography, second language learning |