Best Practices in Character Literacy Instruction

Research on character literacy acquisition on Chinese native speakers and CFL learners reveals that the most successful readers among L1 and CFL learners pay attention to the position and meaning of radicals, the existence of phonetic elements, and the existence, form, and location of other recurring parts. In addition, research reveals that stroke order is involved in the mental storage of characters among L1 and CFL readers.

In short, successful readers see characters as structures composed of a small number of recurrent parts combined according to a small number of rules, rather than as static indivisible pictures.  Based on these findings, we identify the following best practices in character literacy instruction.

• Direct students to notice radicals and their location within characters, and to associate the meaning of radicals with the characters in which they occur.
• Direct students to notice phonetic elements within characters and to use them to remember and recall characters.
• Direct students to notice the other recurring parts (部件) of characters.
• Direct students to follow standard stroke order in writing characters.

These practices do not exclude the typing of characters.  But accurate typing rests on the ability to select the correct character from a number of choices, and to identify and replace incorrect characters with correct ones. The hand writing of characters helps learners to develop the skills they need to distinguish between characters so that they become better readers and more accurate composers of typed text.