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This study examined radical awareness among college students who learned Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).

Radicals are subcomponents of characters. They follow positional constraints and they have meaning-cueing and pronunciation-cueing functions. Radical awareness, the knowledge about the positional and functional regularities of radicals has been found closely related to Chinese word reading and word writing among developing readers in first language literacy acquisition (Chan & Nunes, 1998; Ho, Ng, & Ng, 2003; Packard et al., 2006). The instruction on improving radical awareness was proved beneficial in character recognition, semantic categorization and character writing (Ho, Wong & Chan, 1999; Packard et al, 2006). Despite the wide interests in radical awareness in L1 literacy acquisition, relevant research in second language/foreign language is scant.

Three objectives guided the present study: 1) to determine radical awareness levels among CFL learners who differ in their Chinese proficiency levels; 2) to explore the relation between radical awareness and word recognition among CFL learners and to determine whether this relationship differ between advanced and beginning CFL learners; 3) to explore the shared and unique relations of radical awareness with word recognition in Chinese.

Ninety-seven CFL learners at a US southeastern university participated in the study. They were categorized as either beginning or advanced CFL learners based on a Latent Class analysis. A word recognition test and three tasks were created for the present study. These three tasks included a character legality decision task, a character-meaning matching task, and a character writing task. The character legality decision task was aimed at measuring learners’ implicit positional radical awareness; the character-meaning matching task was aimed at measuring learners’ implicit semantic radical awareness; the character writing task was used to measure…

Schlagworte

Fremdsprachenlernen, Fremdsprachenunterricht, Zweitspracherwerb, Radikale, Chinesisch, Schriftzeichen, Worterkennung, Angewandte Linguistik, Radical awareness, Chinese character learning, Second language acquisition, Foreign language learning, Morphological awareness, Phonological awareness, Orthographic awareness, Word recognition, Applied linguistics