Development of radical awareness at initial learning stage in L2 Chinese: stronger vs. weaker learners of Chinese characters

Abstract Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and comprehension. However, it is unclear how elementary-level L2 Chinese learners develop radical awareness over a relatively long period, particularly for the potential differences between stronger and weaker learners of Chinese characters. To fill the gap, this study investigated 45 beginning-level L2 Chinese participants during a 16-week semester at an American university. They completed a radical identification task, a radical analysis task, and a radical manipulation task in Week 4, Week 9, and Week 15; and a character knowledge task and a vocabulary knowledge task in Week 15. The results showed that learners who were stronger and weaker at reading characters had similar developmental patterns of radical identification, but different developmental patterns of radical analysis and manipulation. Furthermore, each sub-ability of radical awareness of the stronger learners improved faster than those of the weaker learners after Week 4.