Design Specification

Anci Cao

Learning Objectives

Chinese characters are formed in organized ways by their subcomponents-radicals.

Learning characters through radicals can actually help learners decompose and memorize characters in

more systematic ways. Additionally, in Chinese, semantic radicals in most cases suggest character

meaning. By understanding a radical’s meaning (e.g. 女, female), learners can acquire the radical-

derived characters (e.g. 妈, mother; 姐, older sister; 姑, aunt) easier and faster. Thus, the learning

software I intend to design aims to help learners develop semantic radical knowledge to facilitate their

character learning.

Semantic radical knowledge constitutes at least three major components: form, position,

and function. Each radical has its own orthographic features that distinguish it from other radicals.

Learning a radical, first of all, requires learners to memorize its unique shape. Additionally, each

semantic radical is associated with a specific meaning, which can then suggest the meaning of its

derived characters. Learning a radical also means to be able to associate the meaning with its form and

understand how the radical meaning might influence the character meaning. However, one thing needs

to be noted is that each radical tends to appear at certain positions in a character. It functions as a

semantic radical only if it appears at the right positions. Otherwise, even though it has the same

orthographic features, it is not considered a radical thus providing no meaning cues to the characters.

For instance, female radical (女) often appears at the left position in a character as in 妈 (mother) and

姐 (older sister). It thus serves as a semantic radical in these characters and provides semantic cues to

them. However, as in 要 (want), although 女 appears in the character, since it occurs at the bottom, it

does not function as a semantic radical and thus providing no semantic cues to the character.
Therefore, acquiring semantic radical knowledge entails the understanding of these three aspects: form,

position, and function.

Thus, this learning software is intended to help learners develop their semantic radical

knowledge including the three aspects: form, position, and function so that they will be able to 1)

identify target radicals in different characters (knowledge of form and position) and 2) infer the

meaning of unfamiliar characters based on their semantic radicals (knowledge of function and its

application).

Target Learners

This learning software is designed for beginning Chinese learners at University of Illinois at

Chicago (UIC) to facilitate their radical knowledge development. The target learners are adult learners

who are enrolled in Elementary Chinese 101 at UIC. There are three reasons for choosing this group of

learners as target learners. First of all, due to their limited knowledge of characters, novice learners

cannot easily notice the orthographic structures of individual characters and radical functions, thus

being unable to grasp the radical knowledge implicitly and automatically by themselves. Explicit

instruction and additional training are needed for students at this level. Besides, previous studies

suggested that emphasizing radical knowledge as early as possible can benefit learners the most, since

helping learners develop their radical awareness at the initial learning stages can promote their later

character learning. Thirdly, this software is designed for adult learners as they have superior cognitive

abilities and are more able to handle abstract rules and concepts comparing to children. As mentioned

in Brown (2007), the difference between children and adults learning a second language “lies primarily

in the contrast between the child’s spontaneous, peripheral attention to language forms and the adult’s

overt, focal awareness of and attention to those forms” (p.101). It is, in fact, essential to make certain

forms and rules salient to adult learners to help them learn.

Content and Context

This software will be developed based on the textbook being used in Elementary Chinese 101 at

UIC: Integrated Chinese Part I Level I. This textbook consists of ten chapters. Two dialogues with

target grammatical structures and vocabulary words embedded are developed for each chapter based on

a central theme (e.g. greeting, shopping, etc.), so students will be learning a set of new vocabulary

words in each chapter. In total six chapters will be taught in their one-semester long class, and each

chapter will be taught within two weeks. Students meet three times a week for fifteen weeks. This

learning software will be served as a supplement to classroom instructions and will be utilized by

learners themselves outside of class. For each chapter that students learned in the class, they will have

to study a learning unit provided by the software accordingly. In total students will study six radical

learning units using this software.

The reasons for having students use this software outside of class independently are as follows.

First, students will not be able to gain the radical knowledge by simply being told one time by their

instructors. It can be time-consuming to learn the radicals and to internalize the knowledge, as it

requires a large amount of practice and reinforcement. Due to the limited class time, it is not practical

to use the software in class. Secondly, as students are different individuals, it is also not effective to use

it in class. Even though students in the same class are somewhat at the same proficiency level, they

vary in many different aspects, such as their learning ability. Some students might be more sensitive to

target language forms than others, so they might be able to grasp the radical knowledge faster and

easier than others. In contrast, some students might need more time and efforts to process and acquire

the knowledge. Having students study outside of class allows them to study at their own pace and study

as many times as possible based their own needs. Furthermore, allowing students to study

independently also aims to promote learner autonomy, so that they can be in charge of their own

learning. This will in turn motivate students to learn, as they can make their own choices, deciding for

themselves what to think and what to do (Hunt, 1971). However, one of the tradeoffs is that without
teachers’ presence, students have to rely on themselves to make learning decisions. Yet, learners do not

necessarily know how to make appropriate decisions in order to learn effectively. Also, learners need to

be self-regulated to engage in the independent learning. The learning outcomes might be somewhat

affected by these factors.

Design Specification and Rationale

Overall Design

As mentioned above, since this software will be built on the textbook that learners are using as a

supplement to their class, radicals focused in each learning unit will be tied to what they have learned

in corresponding chapters. For instance, in chapter one, learners will be introduced 20 different words,

which contain five different semantic radicals. These radicals will be the learning targets in the radical

learning unit one in the software. However, radicals covered in each chapter in their textbook usually

do not relate to each other. Since each semantic radical has a specific meaning, previous researchers

(Chen et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2013) have classified radicals into categories based on their semantic

meanings (e.g. nature, human body, animals, plants, instruments, numbers, etc.). For instance, 22

radicals are categorized in the semantic field of “human body” including “口” (mouth), “目” (eyes),

“耳” (ear), etc. As suggested by the former studies (Hoshino, 2010; Crow et al., 1985; Hippner, 2000),

learning semantically related words in groups could promote vocabulary learning. It is possible that the

semantic clustering approach could also be utilized in learning radicals, which means that learning

radicals in semantically related groups can help students better memorize and learn those radicals.

Thus, the proposed radical learning software will adopt the semantic clustering approach.

All words introduced in the textbook from chapter one to six have been coded to determine the

semantic field and the target radicals for each radical learning unit. Radicals that are covered in each

chapter and the semantic fields they belong to are first identified. In addition, the determination of
semantic field for each chapter is also based on the radicals appearing in its previous and subsequent

chapters. For instance, the semantic field chosen for learning unit 2 is “human behaviors”, because all

three chapters together (i.e. chapter 1, 2, and 3) contain radicals that are related to this field the most.

The related radicals that are introduced in these three chapters thus will be included in this learning

unit. First of all, it is because of the difficulty of getting enough related radicals within one chapter, as

the radicals often do not semantically relate to each other. At the same time, this creates opportunities

for learners to review and preview the radicals they have encountered or will encounter in the previous

and upcoming lessons. Vocabulary learning needs a large amount of repetition and recycle. Students

will not gain words by one-time learning. They need to constantly re-encounter the words in order to

finally acquire them. One thing needs to note is that since this software is designed for beginning

learners, it is not meant to cover all radicals in Chinese, as learners at this level might feel too

overwhelmed which could in turn demotivate them. Rather, this software will mainly focus on

frequently utilized radicals in Chinese and in the textbook. The frequency of each radical was also

identified, and the uncommon ones that only appear one time or two times throughout the six chapters

are excluded.

In sum, this learning software will be comprised of six learning units, each building around a

semantic field. Each learning unit will consist of four to five semantically related radicals based on the

current, previous, and following chapters.

Learning Unit Design

As for each learning unit, it will consist of three major components: introduction, individual

radical learning, and integration and review. The design details for each component will be described as

follows.

• Introduction

As mentioned above, each learning unit will be built based a semantic field. All radicals focused
in each unit will be related to a central theme, such as body parts, nature, behaviors, etc. Each unit will

then start with an introduction, providing overview of which radicals will be studied in this unit. The

introduction part will introduce the theme and the selected radicals, and each radical will be presented

with a picture. Using pictures not only provides the meaning for each radical but also helps learners

activate a mental schema, which can prepare them for the later learning (e.g. seeing pictures of different

body parts might activate learners’ prior knowledge about this topic). Additionally, interesting and

visually appealing pictures are more able to motivate students comparing to plain text. Thus, the

introduction part starts with engaging and light information, so that students can be motivated at the

beginning.

• Individual Radical Learning

After the introduction part, students will then study individual radicals. For each radical, there

will be two sub-components: basic information presentation and radical application. Learning for all

radicals will follow the same structure.

• Basic Information Presentation

All the radical learning will begin with a presentation, including the information about radicals’

form, meaning, and its regular position. Aside from the text information, pictures will be provided as

well to make the instructional materials more engaging and to facilitate learners’ understanding of

target radicals. Besides, three example characters composed of the radicals will be presented, so that

students can not only see target radicals in real characters but also see the relationship between the

radical and character meaning. All this information is explicitly and directly presented to learners in

this software for several reasons. First of all, since these concepts are relatively complex and differ

from one radical to another, it might be too challenging for beginners to pick up the rules themselves.

Also, introducing the rules systematically to learners can lay a solid foundation for their further practice

and learning.

However, simply presenting information to learners does not necessarily mean that they actually
learned. In fact, students learn little when they are only engaged in a passive learning mode (Chi et al,

2014). According to Chi et al (2014), a passive mode of engagement is defined as “learners being

oriented toward and receiving information from the instructional materials without overtly doing

anything else related to learning” (p.221). This mode of engagement often constitutes minimal learning.

Thus, in order to facilitate more active mode of engagement, even in the presentation part, the software

affords opportunities for learners to manipulate the instructional materials, so that they can be more

engaged in the learning process. Orthographically, learners can manipulate the stroke animation to see

the stroke sequences of target radicals. Also, students can click on example characters to see the color-

encoded target radicals, which can help learners notice the lexical sub-units of characters and reinforce

learners’ perception about radicals’ form and position. Also, the meaning of each example character

will be shown once students click them, so that they can see how target radicals influence the character

meaning.

• Radical Application Exercise

According to Chi et al. (2014), even though active engagement can achieve better learning

outcome, it also only leads to shallow understanding, as the information is still passively transmitted to

learners. Students do not have to construct knowledge themselves, since the knowledge is already

presented and given to them.

In this section, students will be asked to apply what they have learned in the previous section,

determining if each character contains target radicals, thus their radical knowledge will be reinforced

and further constructed by themselves. Even though this might look like a simple yes or no question,

students will have to go through certain reasoning process to make the decision. First, students need to

identify target radicals, which will again reinforce their knowledge about the radicals’ form.

Additionally, if the form of radicals can be identified in characters, students will need to judge if it

functions as a radical or not depending on its position. Thus, making such a decision requires at least

these two steps of processing. In total nine characters will be given, with three positive instances and
six negative instances. Positive instances are the ones containing target radicals. As for negative

instances, there are two types of them: one contains target radicals but appear at wrong positions; the

other does not contain target radicals at all. There will be three instances for each type. After choosing

yes or no, corresponding feedback will be offered by the software. Since learners are using this

software to learn radicals by themselves, feedback provided for them is extremely important. The

feedback will not only tell students whether they did it correctly or not. It will also provide further

explanations (e.g. “Correct! ‘妈’ (mother) does contain ‘女’ radical”; or “Incorrect, ‘女’ radical

usually appears at the left position. Even though ‘女’ is present in ‘要’ (want), it does not function

as a radical”). By checking the feedback, students’ correct knowledge can be reinforced, or their

misconceptions and confusions can be cleared. In the feedback, the character meaning will be provided

as well, so that learners can again see the relationship between radical and character meaning. The

instant feedback provided by the software can be beneficial for learners, but it is still recognized that

when students study alone, some misconceptions might not be identified and resolved easily without

teachers’ further illustration. After completing all these for one character, students will be prompted to

the next character.

Students will go through both presentation and application sections for each radical, and then

they will be directed to the final learning part.

• Integration and Review

Once learners finished learning individual radicals, they will move to the next step, which

integrates all the radicals they have learned in the unit. Although all the radicals are semantically

related, they differ in their form, position, and meaning. The review component is intended to give

learners chances to distinguish one radical to another and to apply what they learned to infer meanings

of unfamiliar words based on radicals.

In this component, all the unfamiliar words will be taken from authentic materials, such as
movie posters, restaurant menus, subway station signs, etc. Students will be asked to infer the meaning

of the words taken from the authentic materials. On one hand, since the goal for learning a second

language is to be able to use it in real life, the ability to infer meaning of unfamiliar words that they

might encounter in real world is crucial. On the other hand, realizing that they can actually guess the

meaning of unfamiliar words can help students see the value of radical learning, which can in turn

largely motivate them to learn.

Each learning unit will be comprised of three components as described above. Students will

have approximately two weeks to study each learning unit. The overall design of a learning unit is

presented in figure 1. As one might see above, all characters are provided isolatedly without any

context in this software, which might only allow learners to gain superficial understandings of those

words. However, since this learning software is intended to teach concepts and rules about radicals

rather than teaching words, those characters are served as examples to show the form, position, and

function of target radicals.

Figure 1. Overall design of a radical learning unit

Assessment and Evaluation

In order to assess the learning outcome, learners will take a short quiz after each learning unit.

The quiz will be comprised of ten multiple-choice questions. Five of them will assess learners’ radical

recognition skill (recognition of radicals’ form and position in unfamiliar characters). The other five

will test on learners’ semantic awareness (knowledge of radicals’ form, position, and function;

application of this knowledge in unfamiliar characters). Additionally, at the end of the semester after
learning all six units, a delayed test targeting on all the radicals will be given. The delayed test will

assess the same skills as in the quizzes. The post learning quizzes and end-of-semester delayed test will

provide evidence on students’ acquisition and retention of those radicals.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning software, students’ usage of the

learning software will be recorded, examined, and correlated with their performance on the quizzes and

delayed test.

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