Abstract
The study investigates the effectiveness of instructional design for non-specialist beginners to learn Chinese Semantic Radicals (SRs). A Chinese SR is the smallest semantic component of a Chinese character. Research has shown that learning Chinese SR benefits the learning of Chinese characters by beginners. Research in this area is scarce with only a few studies investigating the application of related images to learn Chinese characters. This research investigates the performance and opinions of non-specialist beginners regarding four types of instructional designs: simply display, colour coding, illustration, and the combination of colour coding and illustration. The results confirmed that the combination of illustration and Chinese SR has the functions of visualisation, translation and memorisation. Colour coding has the function of position highlighting and memorisation. These research-based findings are an important contribution to knowledge and can inform future design and research when it comes to teaching Chinese SRs for non-specialist beginners.
Keywords
Instructional design; illustration; colour coding; effectiveness
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.363
Citation
Tian, T., Lonsdale, M., and Cheung, V. (2020) Instructional Design for Non-specialist Beginners to Learn Chinese Semantic Radicals, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.363
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Instructional Design for Non-specialist Beginners to Learn Chinese Semantic Radicals
The study investigates the effectiveness of instructional design for non-specialist beginners to learn Chinese Semantic Radicals (SRs). A Chinese SR is the smallest semantic component of a Chinese character. Research has shown that learning Chinese SR benefits the learning of Chinese characters by beginners. Research in this area is scarce with only a few studies investigating the application of related images to learn Chinese characters. This research investigates the performance and opinions of non-specialist beginners regarding four types of instructional designs: simply display, colour coding, illustration, and the combination of colour coding and illustration. The results confirmed that the combination of illustration and Chinese SR has the functions of visualisation, translation and memorisation. Colour coding has the function of position highlighting and memorisation. These research-based findings are an important contribution to knowledge and can inform future design and research when it comes to teaching Chinese SRs for non-specialist beginners.