Prychologia, 1999, 42, 2+3-251 USING RADICALS IN TEACHING CHINESE CHARACTERS TO SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS Marcus TAFT and Kevin CHUNG Uniuersitltof New South Wales,Australia A study was carried out to determine whether knowledge of the internal radical structure of a Chinese character helps a naive learner to memorize that character. Four groups of Australian subjectswho knew nothing about Chinese were asked to learn24 character/meaning pairs (e.g., ER-CHBW). Each character was composed of two radicals taken from a set of 16. Every subject was presented with the set of character-meaning pairs three times and then were given each character alone and asked to recall the meaning associated with it. Before seeing any characters, one group (Radicals Before) told about radicals and had 15 minutes to learn the set of 16 radicals thoroughly. Another (Radicals Early) was told about radicals at the first presentation of the stimuli, but were simply asked, as each character was presented, to point out on a chart its component radicals. A third group (Radicals Late) didthe same thing, but at the third presentation of the stimuli; while a final group (No Radicak) were told nothing about radicals at all. It was found that memory for the character-meaning pairings was best for the Radicals Early group, suggesting that it is important to highlight the radicals when a character is first presented to the learner. Key words: Chinese characters, radicals, teaching orthography, secondlanguage learning Chinese'characters are composed of strokes combined in such away as to form structures that can be called "radicals". By the definition to be used here, many characters contain more than one radical (..g., [H. is composed of the radical tr on the left and the radical fL on the right). When teaching new Chinese characters to second language learners, it is sometimes the case that explicit emphasis is placed on this radical structure (".g., Huang & Chen, 19BB), but often that it is not (..g., DeFrancis, 1965; Lee, 1993). In the latter case, characters are learnt by rote, supported by practice in writing the character stroke by stroke. Certainly, stroke order tends to follow radical structure in the sense that the strokes that compose a radical are typically written consecutively, but the discrete point where one radical fihishes and the next radical begins is not made explicit in the teaching process. Occasionally, it is noted that several characters share certain sub-units, but there is little systematic teaching of the radical building blocks. The question being addressed in this article is whether character learning is facilitated when radical structure is given prominence rather being disregarded, as it so often is. The research reported here was supported by a grant to the first author from the Australian Research Council. Correspondence: Marcus Taft, School of Psychology, IJniversity of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia (E-mail: M.Taft@unsw.edu.au). 2+3