Abstract
The present study is aimed at investigating the effect of a radical-derived Chinese character teaching strategy on enhancing Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners' Chinese orthographic awareness. An e-learning teaching platform, based on statistical data from the Chinese Orthography Database Explorer (Chen, Chang, Chou, Sung, & Chang, 2011), was established and used as an auxiliary teaching tool. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest quasi-experiment was conducted, with 129 Chinese-American CFL learners as participants (69 people in the experimental group and 60 people in the comparison group), to examine the effectiveness of the e-learning platform. After a three-week course-involving instruction on Chinese orthographic knowledge and at least seven phonetic/semantic radicals and their derivative characters per week-the experimental group performed significantly better than the comparison group on a phonetic radical awareness test, a semantic radical awareness test, as well as an orthography knowledge test.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 89-106 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Language Learning and Technology |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 Feb |
Keywords
- Chinese as a foreign language (CFL)
- Chinese orthographic awareness
- Phonetic/semantic radicals
- Radical-derived character instructional method
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Computer Science Applications