Pilot Study on the Effect of Grouping and Compositional Analysis on Chinese Character Retention

Warren Daniel Child, East Asian Languages and Literature

Ten adult students of Chinese as a foreign language were tested over a two-day period using a repeated-measures design to determine whether logical grouping and component explanations might facilitate the short-term retention of Chinese characters. The subjects consisted of volunteers originating from American universities with two to four years of prior instruction. All subjects were presented two sets of data: ungrouped, unrelated characters with basic reading (pronunciation) and meaning data; and grouped, graphemically related characters that, in addition to reading and meanings, included explanations on character composition. Recall of form, reading, and meaning were all tested. Testing was administered twice: once immediately after an initial 45-minute study period; and once again 24 hours later, with no opportunity to study during the interim. During a follow-up period, a survey of student learning strategies and their impressions about the experimental approach used was also administered. Overall, survey responses to the experimental approach to teaching characters used in the study were positive. The test data indicated that presenting compositional explanations and grouping characters significantly reduced character meaning errors on day 1 (t = 2.13, p < .05). Grouping with explanations also reduced day-2 recall errors for both meaning (t = 2.06, p < .05) and form (t = 2.96, p < .05). Finally, in sharp contrast with the received wisdom of the Chinese language teaching community, the study results suggest that remembering character readings is far more difficult than remembering either forms or meanings.