The Survey On Radical Difficulties Evaluation By Western Students And Experimental Studies On Radicals By Itself A Character

To teach western students Chinese Characters is always the most painful part in TCSL. Many reseachers suggest an independent character program and to use radicals to teach characters. However, the study on the radical system is not enough to set up an efficient program.So in this study we try to set up a character teaching program based on radical difficulties evaluation by the western students whose mother tongues are alphabetic languages.The survey covers all 515 radicals from 2905 characters in the HSK Graded Character Syllabus. Accoding to the survey's result, only about 100 radicals are considered very difficult. And the evaluation is correlated with the stroke numbers of radicals, the character numbers made up with the radical and whether the radical is by itself a character. Radicals with smaller stroke numbers, radicals which can make more characters or radicals which can be a character by itself have lower evaluation of the difficulties.Based on what we found in the survey, we design 2 experiments to study how radicals by itself a character work on the cognitive process of western students copying the characters. The experiments shows that the radical is basic processing unit also for western students, esp. when the characters are not famliar to them. If students have enough time to process the charater, characters with radicals by itself a character are easier for students to copy them correctly than characters without such radicals. While students don't have enough time, the radicals' familiarity will influence the processing instead of whether radical can be a character by itself. Analysis on mistake types tells us the main factor which dominates the processing is the radical instead of the structure of characters.Based on our research we suggest on setting up an independent short-period character course to the beginners so as to develop orthographic awareness as fast as possible. We make lists of radicals and characters which will be used in the course and how to teach them.