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 with it comes o teaching Chinese SRs for non-specialist beginners.