Development of radical awareness at initial learning stage in L2 Chinese: stronger vs. weaker learners of Chinese characters

Abstract

Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and comprehension. However, it is unclear how elementary-level L2 Chinese learners develop radical awareness over a relatively long period, particularly for the potential differences between stronger and weaker learners of Chinese characters. To fill the gap, this study investigated 45 beginning-level L2 Chinese participants during a 16-week semester at an American university. They completed a radical identification task, a radical analysis task, and a radical manipulation task in Week 4, Week 9, and Week 15; and a character knowledge task and a vocabulary knowledge task in Week 15. The results showed that learners who were stronger and weaker at reading characters had similar developmental patterns of radical identification, but different developmental patterns of radical analysis and manipulation. Furthermore, each sub-ability of radical awareness of the stronger learners improved faster than those of the weaker learners after Week 4.

Keywords:

• L2 Chinese
• radical awareness
• character knowledge
• development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 First, five one-way ANOVAs were conducted to investigate whether the radical and character knowledge of the participants in different classes were different. The results showed that there were no significant differences among the participants in the three Chinese classes on radical identification ability in Week 15, F(2, 37) = 0.01, p = .99; radical analysis ability in Week 15, F(2, 37) = 1.55, p = .23; radical manipulation ability in Week 15, F(2, 37) = 1.54, p = .23; character knowledge in Week 15, F(2, 37) = 1.01, p = .37; and vocabulary knowledge in Week 15, F(2, 37) = 1.83, p = .18. The post hoc analyses also showed no significant differences of the participants’ abilities/knowledge in each pairwise comparison between classes (all ps > .05). Second, five Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to explore whether the radical and character knowledge of the participants taught by the two instructors were different. The results revealed no significant differences between the two instructor groups on radical identification ability in Week 15, (p = .64), radical analysis ability in Week 15 (p = .15), radical manipulation ability in Week 15 (p = .86), character knowledge in Week 15 (p = .53) and vocabulary knowledge in Week 15 (p = .17).

2 Cronbach’s coefficient α was used to calculate the internal consistency. In this study, a normal indication of alpha (≥ 0.70) was used as a threshold as an acceptable level (Taber, 2018).

3 Cluster cohesion measures how closely related are participants in a cluster, while cluster separation measures how distinct or well-separated a cluster is from other clusters. Silhouette coefficient combines ideas of both cohesion and separation, but for individual points, as well as clusters.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by Young Scholars Research Project [2021QNPY70] and Key Research Project of “Double First-Class” Initiative by Minzu University of China [No. 20SYL011].

Notes on contributors

Tianxu Chen

Tianxu Chen, a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, is an Associate Professor at Minzu University of China. His research interest is L2 reading, vocabulary learning, and teaching Chinese as a second language. His recent publications have appeared in Reading and Writing, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Foreign Language Annals, and so on.