Using meaningful interpretation and chunking to enhance memory the case of chinese characters writing 6

402 FALL 2013
Using Meaningful Interpretation
and Chunking to Enhance
Memory: The Case of Chinese
Character Learning
Xiaoqiu Xu
Pearson Knowledge Technologies
Amado M. Padilla
Stanford University
Abstract: Learning and retaining Chinese characters are often considered to be the
most challenging elements in learning Chinese as a foreign language. Applying the theory
of meaningful interpretation, the chunking mnemonic technique, and the linguistic
features of Chinese characters, this study examines whether the method of meaningful
interpretation and chunking (MIC) can promote learners’ immediate learning and
retention of Chinese characters. Mandarin Chinese learners at two high schools were
randomized into a treatment group and a control group. Students in the treatment group
learned Chinese characters with the MIC method, whereas their peers in the control
group learned characters by the traditional method of rote repetition according to the
stroke order. Four balanced character sets were introduced each day for four continuous
days with three different interventions: teacher‐instructed method on Day 1, teacher‐cued
method on Day 2, and students’ independent work on Day 3 and Day 4. Students’ learning
outcomes of the characters were measured with (1) immediate quizzes given each day
after instruction, (2) a retention test (after one week) that integrated all the immediate
quizzes, and (3) an application test administered two months after the experiment. The
findings suggest that MIC enhances learners’ immediate learning and retention of
Chinese characters. In addition, the teacher‐cued method and familiar independent work
were more effective for learning and retaining Chinese characters than the teacher‐instructed
method and unfamiliar independent work. Furthermore, the treatment effect
also varied across the measurement components (meaning vs. perception), levels of
instruction, and heritage versus non‐heritage groups.
Key words: Chinese characters, chunking, meaningful interpretation, radical
knowledge, teaching methods
Xiaoqiu Xu (PhD, Stanford University) is a test development specialist at Pearson
Knowledge Technologies, Sunnyvale, CA.
Amado M. Padilla (PhD, University of New Mexico) is Professor of Psychological
Studies in Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Foreign Language Annals, Vol. 46, Iss. 3, pp. 402–422. © 2013 by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages.
DOI: 10.1111/flan.12039

Foreign Language Annals VOL. 46, NO. 3 403
Introduction
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of
the U.S. Department of State has categorized
foreign languages taught in the United States
into three classes based on linguistic
distance and the length of time it takes
English‐speaking students to achieve gener-al
professional proficiency in speaking and
reading (“Language Learning Difficulty for
English Speakers,” n.d.). Mandarin Chinese
is one of just a very small number of
languages assigned to Category III, which
are exceptionally difficult for native English
speakers to learn. The FSI estimates that it
takes approximately 2,200 class hours, with
at least half of that time spent in immersion
study, to reach the level of proficiency
needed to use a Category III language in a
professional setting (“Language Learning
Difficulty for English Speakers,” n.d.).
The most challenging task in mastering
Mandarin is learning the Chinese characters.
While English is an alphabetic language
whose writing system roughly represents its
sound system, the Chinese sound system
and writing system seem to be independent
of each other. Thus, mastery of Chinese
characters is difficult because of the large
number of nonphonetic, visually complex
symbols that constitute the orthography of
the language (Packard, 1990). Students
without sufficient knowledge of Chinese
characters often encounter considerable
difficulty in reading (Shen, 2005), with
novice learners of Chinese claiming that
Chinese characters are like “random sym-bols”
that are beyond mastery and retention
due to their large quantity and lack of
regularity (Wu, 1992).
Contrary to students’ beliefs, Chinese
characters are not random symbols without
patterns and regularities. An exploration
into Chinese characters1 reveals that trace-able
patterns exist that students can use to
facilitate learning characters, reading, and
writing. Linguistically, the composition of
Chinese characters is categorized into six
types: pictograms, simple ideograms, ideo-grammic
compounds, phono‐semantic com-pound
characters, phonetic loan characters,
and derivative cognates (Boltz, 1994;
Wang, 1993; see Appendix A, Part I).
Among the six categories of characters,
phono‐semantic compounds ( in Chi-nese)
form more than 90% of Chinese
characters (Boltz, 1994). A phono‐semantic
character is composed of a phonetic element
and a meaning element, or so‐called pho-netic
and semantic “radical” ( in Chi-nese).
Theoretically, a phonetic radical
represents the sound of a character and a
semantic radical provides clues to the
meaning of the character (see examples of
typical characters with phonetic and seman-tic
radicals in Appendix A, Part I). Strokes
are the basic building materials for radicals.
For example, the radical consists of two
strokes, and . There are a total of 28
distinguishable types of strokes, and the
number of strokes in a particular character
may vary from 1 to 30 (Shen, 2005).
Furthermore, the way strokes combine
and vary across the many Chinese radicals
and characters makes them particularly
challenging to write and remember, espe-cially
for novice learners.
Adding to the difficulty of mastering
knowledge of radicals and phono‐semantic
compounds is the evolution of Chinese
characters. Because many Chinese charac-ters
have evolved and changed, in modern
usage, only about 26% of phono‐semantic
compound characters are transparent char-acters2
(Zhu, as cited in Everson, 1986). In
reality, the phonetic radical does not always
identify with the pronunciation of the
character, nor does the meaning radical
always correspond to the meaning of the
character. These characters are called non-transparent
characters, and they make up
the majority of phono‐semantic compound
characters (Everson, 1986). Among these
nontransparent characters, the meaning and
sound radicals only serve as a clue to the
meaning and sound of a character, some-times
requiring that the learner engage in
effortful imagination. For example, the
Chinese character is pronounced as fa
(third tone3), meaning law in English.
Here the left part radical is the semantic

404 FALL 2013
component, which means water, and its
right part radical is the phonetic compo-nent,
which is pronounced as qu (fourth
tone). In this phono‐semantic compound
character , the phonetic and semantic
radicals are no longer consistent with the
sound and meaning of the character. It is a
typical example of nontransparent phono‐semantic
compound characters.
As many Chinese characters are non-transparent
phono‐semantic compound
characters, it becomes impossible to rely
on a simple meaningful interpretation of
Chinese characters by using the sound and
meaning radicals. Therefore, the Chinese
Linguistics Bureau (2005) and Chu
(2005, 2009) proposed a new method called
bujian jiaoxuefa (chunking method), or the
component‐oriented net‐weaving approach,
which employed chunking (bujian) and
connections between chunks, or compo-nents,
to promote character learning. Al-though
bujian and radicals have many
overlaps, bujian no longer represents the
semantic or phonological components of
characters but represents instead frequently
appearing chunks in Chinese characters. In
the 3,500 most frequently used Chinese
characters, there are only 132 bujian (see
Appendix A, Part II). According to this
method:
Chinese characters are hierarchically
organized into the three levels of stroke,
bujian, and character. Thousands of
characters consist of hundreds of bujian;
hundreds of bujian consist of tens of
strokes… Strokes and bujian are repeti-tive.
Characters are linked together as a
huge network by repeated bujian.
(Chu, 2005, p. 250; emphasis added)
Chu (2005, 2009) proposed that, at the
initial learning stage, learners have to learn
all the bujian with their accompanying
strokes as well as the order of writing each
stroke. However, as students progress, they
acquire the ability to automatically apply the
bujian knowledge to new characters with
little difficulty. Although this new method
for teaching Chinese characters has been
proposed and implemented in some Manda-rin
classrooms (Chu, 2009), no empirical
studies have been conducted to examine its
effectiveness in Chinese character learning.
This study examined the teaching of
Chinese characters utilizing an approach
called meaningful interpretation and chunk-ing
(MIC) that integrated several linguistic
features of Chinese characters (i.e., origina-tion
and types of Chinese characters includ-ing
the radical knowledge and bujian) and
employed mnemonic strategies more com-monly
found in cognitive studies of
memory.
Literature Review
MIC in Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychologists hold that our im-mediate
recall and retention of information
is selective: We recall and retain information
that is personally meaningful rather than
random symbols or structures (Anderson,
2005). Evidence in support of meaningful
interpretation has been collected with
respect to short‐term memory of meaning‐significant
changes vs. detail changes in a
picture (Mandler Ritchey, 1977), imme-diate
recall of meaningful vs. random chess
positions (Schneider, Gruber, Gold,
Opwis, 1993), and retention of theme and
meaning vs. details of a picture (Achor,
Imoko,Uloko, 2009; Chow, Woodford,
Maes, 2011). Furthermore, meaningful in-terpretation
enhances students’ retention
of knowledge and has been widely used
by educators in different academic fields,
such as biology (Cavallo, 1992), art (Cal-verley,
Grafer, Hauser, 2002), statistics
(Chow et al., 2011), and math (Achor
et al., 2009).
Chunking is another popular strategy
(Ericsson, Chase, Faloon, 1980) and
refers to processing small units of informa-tion
(chunks) and grouping them into
larger, meaningful units (Chase Simon,
1973). The importance of chunking origi-nated
with Miller’s (1956) work that showed
that short‐term memory had a capacity of
about seven plus‐or‐minus two chunks and

that short‐term memory could be enhanced
by recoding information into a small amount
of high‐information‐content items. In the
field of language learning, research about
chunking remains inconclusive and conven-tional
thinking holds that chunking, or
decomposing, is effective for alphabetic
word acquisition. Most research has been
conducted in the field of English word
recognition and acquisition (Rastle, Davis,
Marslen‐Wilson, Tyler, 2000; Rubin
Becker, 1979; Taft Forster, 1975), indi-cating
that English words can be grouped
into a variety of smaller units such as
individual letters, spelling patterns, sylla-bles,
and morphemes. These smaller units
can then function as basic perceptual units
for processing in word recognition and
acquisition (Taft Forster, 1975).
Research has also shown that associa-tions
between items or chunks can assist in
short‐term recall (Tulving Patkau, 1962).
Stuart and Hulme (2000) found that pre‐exposing
pairs of low‐frequency words in
order to create associative links between
them had substantial beneficial effects on
immediate serial recall performance. These
findings indicate that associating links
between items or increasing availability of
prior knowledge can enhance retention. An
important implication, then, is that teachers
should pay attention to linking items with
the same or similar chunks.
MIC in Teaching and Learning
Chinese Characters
Despite the evidence in support of meaning-ful
interpretation and chunking in cognitive
psychology, no study has applied both of
these cognitive processes to examine how
Chinese characters are taught. The majority
of related studies have focused on radical
knowledge and the essence of meaningful
interpretation of Chinese characters and
have demonstrated a correlation between
radical knowledge and Chinese character
acquisition. For example, Taft and Zhu’s
studies (1995, 1997) argued that there is “a
radical‐transportation effect” on readers and
that all simple radicals are independently
activated in the process of character recog-nition,
including the characters containing
more complicated radicals. Therefore, the
recognition of Chinese characters is pro-moted
by the activation of information
about their component radicals. Further-more,
Shen’s study (2000), which investi-gated
the relationships between radical
knowledge and recognition and production
of novel phonetic‐semantic compounds,
showed that students with good radical
knowledge performed significantly better in
the production of novel morphological
transparent characters than did students
who lacked equivalent radical knowledge. In
a follow‐up study with college learners, Shen
and Ke (2007) found a linear relationship
between the development of radical knowl-edge
and the ability to apply that knowledge
in Chinese word acquisition.
Although a connection between radical
knowledge and Chinese character learning
seems to have been established, a method to
effectively teach radical knowledge is yet to
be studied and discussed. A controversy
exists as to whether Mandarin teachers
should systematically and explicitly teach
radical knowledge to students (Shen, 2007;
Taft Chung, 1999; Wang, Liu, Perfetti,
2004). Recent research has supported teach-er‐
assisted instruction of positional and
functional regularities of radicals (Taft
Zhu, 1995, 1997). More important, research
has shown that if teachers explicitly intro-duce
target characters with the meaning and
use of radicals, then students are more likely
to associate the learned radical knowledge
with the pronunciation and meaning of
newly learned characters, which expedites
learning (Taft Chung, 1999; Wang et al.,
2004).
In a recent research study, Shen (2007)
showed that student‐initiated elaboration
can be as effective as teacher‐guided elabo-ration
in the long term. In the study, three
types of encoding strategies were used
during character learning; these included
rote memorization (shallow processing),
student self‐motivated elaboration (deeper

406 FALL 2013
processing), and teacher‐guided elaboration
(deeper processing). Her findings indicated
that elaboration resulted in significantly
better retention for sound and meaning of
characters than did rote memorization.
Between student self‐motivated elaboration
and teacher‐guided elaboration, retention of
sound and meaning was significantly better
with teacher‐guided elaboration in study
intervals of 20 minutes; however, this
advantage disappeared at a 48‐hour recall
interval. Therefore, teacher elaboration
apparently only enhanced working memory,
not the retention of character sound and
meaning. In other words, after being intro-duced
to the method of deep processing,
student self‐motivated elaboration can be as
effective as teacher‐guided elaboration.
Finally, Everson and Ke (1997) found
that highly proficient learners have a more
advanced understanding of Chinese orthog-raphy
and morphology. In a sight‐reading
task employing think‐aloud protocols, these
learners more easily applied their radical
knowledge to identify unknown characters
and made fewer random decisions to figure
out the pronunciation and meaning of these
characters. With regard to language learners’
family background, although no specific
study has been identified investigating the
difference on Chinese character learning
between heritage and non‐heritage learners
of Chinese, research has demonstrated that
the two groups differ significantly in
language learning in terms of their motiva-tion,
resources, and general learning strate-gies
(Liu, 2012; Scrimgeour, 2012; Wen,
2011). Therefore, in the study, both heritage
and non‐heritage participants were re-cruited,
and their learning outcomes using
the MIC method were analyzed and
compared.
Research Questions
To examine the effectiveness of the MIC
method as well as the instructional setting in
which the method was delivered, this
empirical study compared an experimental
group and a control group’s learning and
retention of Chinese characters and ad-dressed
the following research questions:
1. Is the MIC method more effective than
the traditional stroke‐order method in
students’ immediate learning of Chinese
characters?
2. Does the MIC method produce greater
retention of Chinese characters than the
traditional stroke‐order method?
3. Does the MIC method have a long‐term
effect on students’ learning of Chinese
characters?
4. Which treatment is more effective in
learning Chinese characters: teacher total
instruction, teacher‐cued instruction, or
students’ independent work?
5. How does level of instruction (2nd year
vs. 3rd year students) and heritage vs.
non‐heritage learner status affect instruc-tional
treatment for learning Chinese
characters?
Methods
Design
The study was conducted in the Palo Alto
Unified School District in northern California.
Due to limited time and resources, a con-venient
sampling strategy (Alreck Settle,
1994) was used to select the study partici-pants
from two local high schools. The
participants included 124 students enrolled
in Chinese classes. Given that the main
experiment lasted for only four days, the
16 students (seven students in the control
group and nine students in the treatment
group) who were absent on any of the four
days were excluded from the analyses. T
test comparisons showed that the pretest
results of the absent students in the control
and treatment groups were not signifi-cantly
different (p 0.05), and therefore
their absence would not bias the study.
The participants ranged in age from 14 to
17 years. Among the 108 participants, 70
were male (65%) and 38 were female
(35%). Thirty‐five students (32%) were

heritage speakers, and 73 students (68%)
were non‐heritage speakers.
This study employed a randomized
experimental design. Students were ran-domized
into a treatment group and a
control group within the same class as
follows. First, the original 124 students were
homogeneously grouped by pretest scores.
The pretest was a recognition test adminis-tered
one day before the experiment and
consisted of all 32 characters to be taught
in the study. During the pretest, students
were asked to write down the pinyin and
meaning of the characters. Test papers were
collected immediately afterward, and results
were never shared with students so that
students did not receive any instructional
exposure to those characters except in the
experiment. After ranking students by their
pretest performance, matched pairs with
successive ranks were formed. Second,
matched pairs were randomly assigned
such that one student participated in the
treatment group and the other in the control
group. Third, a few participants within a
matched pair were switched to balance the
gender distribution between the treatment
and control groups. Table 1 presents
information about participants’ group,
school, and level.
Students at both schools used the same
textbook series, Nihao, and had completed
approximately the same amount of instruc-tional
time and content based on their level of
Chinese instruction. A standardized Chinese
assessment instrument, the Standards‐based
Assessment and Measurement of Proficiency
(STAMP), was administered to students
approximately two weeks before the study.
The results indicated that the majority of
Chinese II students fell into the novice‐low4
to novice‐mid categories, the majority of
Chinese III students fell into the novice‐mid
to novice‐high categories, and themajority of
Chinese IV students fell into the novice‐high
to intermediate‐low categories.
Materials
Both the control and treatment groups were
taught eight Chinese characters daily for
four consecutive days for a total of 32
different characters (see Table 2). The
characters were all selected from the word
lists of Lessons 4, 5, and 6 in Nihao IV. The
highest‐level students (Chinese IV students
at School A) in the study were learning
Lesson 2 in Nihao IV when the study began.
Therefore, the characters used in the study
had never been taught formally in class to
students. Five criteria were used to select the
characters for the study: human memory
capacity,5 number of strokes (i.e., density),
frequency of characters, transparency of
phono‐semantic compounds, and learning
in context (see Appendix B). By following
these criteria, the daily level of difficulty was
controlled to enable within‐subject compar-isons
across the four instructional days.
TABLE 1
Distribution of Experimental and Control Group
Experimental
Group
Control Group
Level II (about 120 instructional
hours)
11 (School A) þ
11 (School B)
12 (School A) þ
11(School B)
Level III (about 240 instructional
hours)
8 (School A) þ
15 (School B)
9 (School A) þ
15 (School B)
Level IV (about 360 instructional
hours)
8 (School A) 8 (School A)
Total 53 students 55 students

408 FALL 2013
For both the treatment and control
groups, handouts on which characters and
activities would be covered were provided to
students. A substitute Chinese teacher (see
“Procedure” below for details) was trained
in using the handouts for the study lessons.
The treatment group also received an extra
handout illustrating types of Chinese char-acters
based on their origin and the MIC
method (see Appendix A). In addition to
the handouts, Chinese‐English dictionaries
were available to all participants in the
study’s follow‐up activities.
Procedure
To prevent research outcomes from being
influenced by subjective bias, the partici-pants
and the experimenter were blind to
who was assigned to the experimental and
control groups. A credentialed substitute
Mandarin teacher was employed as the
experimenter to teach all participants in
both groups. The teacher was trained in the
steps that should be followed in delivering
the study instruction to the participants.
The experiment was conducted during
the regular Chinese class periods in both
schools. For the control group, the teacher
used a traditional method (i.e., stroke‐order
rote memorization) to teach the Chinese
characters. On Day 1, students followed the
teacher’s model, writing the character stroke
by stroke (teacher‐instructed traditional
method). On Day 2, the teacher provided
the character’s stroke order on the board,
and students practiced writing by them-selves
(teacher‐cued traditional method).
On Day 3, students were asked to study eight
characters by themselves and practice each
character’s stroke order (student indepen-dent
traditional method). The teacher was
not in the classroom. On Day 4, the student
independent traditional method from Day 3
was repeated for a new character set. This
practice lasted for approximately 15 minutes
on each day of the experiment. Afterward,
students participated in “making up words
and phrases,” an activity in which they had
to look up characters in the dictionary and
use those characters to make two words or
phrases. This activity lasted approximately
10 minutes on each day of the experiment.
For the treatment group, on the day
before the experiment, the teacher intro-duced
the MIC method with three steps. The
first step in this method was to introduce the
origin and types of Chinese characters (see
TABLE 2
Character Sets Selected for Four Days
Strokes Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
5 strokes 90

129 1018 589
213 166 320 565
6–7 strokes 360 988 127 73
827 531 110 1652
8–9 strokes 219 846 586 170
1149 504 499 362
10–15 strokes 326 134 824 474
822 55 41 295
Words

Note: Numbers are the frequency ranking of Chinese characters based on the Modern
Chinese Character Frequency List (http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinesecomputing/statistics/
char/list.php?Which¼MO).

Appendix A, Part I). Because introducing all
six linguistic breakdowns can be over-whelming
for new Chinese as a foreign
language learners, teachers can simplify the
knowledge by leaving out phonetic loan
characters and derivative cognates because
they are the most difficult to deconstruct and
make up less than 1% of all Chinese
characters (Boltz, 1994; Wang, 1993).
Therefore, in this study, only the first four
types of Chinese characters (pictograms,
simple ideograms, ideogrammic com-pounds,
and phono‐semantic compound
characters) were introduced to students.
The teacher emphasized radical knowledge
when teaching the phono‐semantic com-pound
characters. For each type of charac-ter,
she gave abundant examples of Chinese
characters and demonstrated how they
could be meaningfully interpreted.
Then, the teacher told students that
phono‐semantic compounds (xingsheng zi)
comprised about 90% of Chinese characters
and that only about 26% of the phono‐semantic
compounds were transparent or
close to transparent. Definitions and exam-ples
of transparent and nontransparent
characters were given to students. To
memorize those nontransparent characters,
the teacher suggested that students use
bujian (chunks) for memorization. She
introduced the method of bujian and
indicated that only 132 of the most common
bujian could be found in a list of the 3,500
most frequently used Chinese characters
(see Appendix A, Part II). She also gave
examples on how to chunk several Chinese
characters.
In the third step, the teacher listed
several characters that consisted of the same
radicals or chunks; by doing so, she
facilitated students’ identification and asso-ciation
of those radicals, chunks, and
characters (see Appendix A, Part III). The
teacher then stated that, although the
element of meaningful interpretation fo-cused
on the types of Chinese characters and
radical knowledge and while the element of
chunking focused on the structures of
Chinese characters, students should com-bine
both elements as there were overlaps
between chunks and radicals that frequently
connect the characters consisting of the same
chunks or radicals. This three‐step intro-duction
lasted approximately 90 minutes
and did not involve the characters selected
in the study.
After students participated in the above
three‐step orientation to the MIC method,
on Day 1 of the experiment, the teacher
introduced eight characters to students by
providing her own interpretation and mem-ory
tips based on the MIC method (teacher‐instructed
MIC). For example, when intro-ducing
the character (ren, recognize), the
teacher mentioned that the left radical
represented the meaning (talk, express out)
and the right radical represented the sound
(ren, similar pronunciation of ). When
introducing the character (shi, recognize),
the teacher mentioned that the left radical ,
again, represented the meaning (talk, ex-press
out) and the right radical repre-sented
the sound (zhi), emphasizing that the
phonetic radical might not exactly match the
sound of the compound character. Another
example was the character of . The teacher
told students that chunking could be used in
memorizing this character and wrote the tip
on the board: ¼ þ þ þ . On
Day 2, the activities repeated Day 1’s
structure; however, the teacher changed
the character set and encouraged students’
own interpretation and character chunking
by providing cues (teacher‐cued MIC). For
example, when she taught , she said, “This
is a phono‐semantic compound, which means
one radical represents pinyin and the other
represents the meaning. Who can share his
or her memory tips?” When teaching , the
teacher told students that they could chunk
the character into familiar bujian and asked
students which two bujian they could
identify and in what other characters they
had seen them before. On Day 3, students
were asked to self‐study the eight characters
using the MIC method. The teacher was not
present (student independent MIC). The
student independent MIC method was
repeated on Day 4, except that the

410 FALL 2013
participants studied a different character
set. Similar to the control group, time was
controlled for learning the eight characters
each day (about 15 minutes). After
learning the character set, the treatment
group joined the control group for the
words‐and‐phrases activity, which lasted
approximately 10 minutes, in the same
classroom.
A quiz was administered in the same
classroom each day to both groups after the
words‐and‐phrases activity (see Appendix
C). In the first section of the quiz, after the
teacher pronounced the Chinese charac-ters
one by one, students wrote the
characters and their meanings in English.
In the second section, students completed
a character‐recognition task in which they
saw the printed characters and were asked
to provide their pinyin spelling and mean-ings
in English.
On Day 5, a week later, a retention test
was administered to both the treatment
and control groups. Items on this cumula-tive
test were presented in the same format
as the previous quizzes (administered on
Day 1 through Day 4) and included
characters taught on Day 1 through Day 4.
Finally, to examine whether the MIC
method enhanced long‐term student learn-ing,
an application test was given two
months after the experiment. Rather than
assess students on the Chinese characters
they learned in the experiment, the
application test followed the same format
as the retention test but examined students
on the characters they learned from their
classroom teachers in the two‐month
period after the experiment finished. The
intention of this test was to determine
whether students could apply the MIC
method to their own Chinese character
learning. The experimental design is
shown in Table 3.
Measures
The immediate, retention, and application
tests applied the same four types of
measurement to test students’ memory of
TABLE 3
Design of the Study
Day 1 Day 2 Days 3 and 4 One week later Two months later
Application test on
Content Character set 1 Character set 2 Character sets 3 and 4 Retention test (Quiz
Chinese characters
taught in between
1 þ 2 þ 3 þ 4)
Students’ independent
traditional method
Teacher‐cued
Step 1
Control group Teacher‐instructed
traditional method
traditional method
Treatment group Teacher‐instructed MIC Teacher‐cued MIC Students’ independent
MIC
Step 2 (Both) Related activity Related activity Related activity
Step 3 (Both) Quiz 1 Quiz 2 Quiz 3, 4

characters: (1) reading the character and
writing down its pinyin, (2) reading the
character and writing down its meaning,
(3) listening to the character and writing
down the character, and (4) listening to the
character and writing down its meaning. For
the two reading tasks, characters were
presented on a handout and students were
required to write down their pinyin spelling
and meanings. For the two listening tasks,
characters were dictated and students were
required to write down the characters and
their meanings.
The number and percentage of correct
pinyin spellings, written characters, and
character meanings were measured. Stu-dents
earned one point if they wrote the
pinyin correctly (including tones), one
point if they wrote the character correctly,
and one point if they wrote the correct
meaning. When students provided the right
pronunciation with an incorrect tone, they
received a score of 0.75. When students
provided an intelligible pronunciation that
was almost correct, they received a score of
0.5. When students made a small mistake in
the character writing, such as missing or
adding a stroke, but the character was still
recognizable, they received a score of 0.5. If
the meaning provided was close, but not
exactly correct, they also received a score
of 0.5.
Analyses
First, to make the analysis more concise and
efficient, the two most relevant measure-ments—
reading the character and writing
down its pinyin spelling and listening to the
pinyin spelling and writing down the
character—were combined and renamed as
the perception component. The other two
tasks—reading the character and writing
down its meaning and listening to the
character and writing down its meaning—
were also combined and renamed as the
meaning component.
Multi‐factor ANOVA was performed to
analyze three main variables in the study:
instructional differences as indicated by the
variable day (four levels6), the treatment or
control condition as indicated by the
variable group (two levels), and different
measurements as indicated by the variable
component (two levels). To investigate the
main effects of the MIC method and
different instructional strategies on the test
components as well as their interactions
between each other, a 2 (group) 4 (day)
2 (component) multi‐factor ANOVA was
conducted.
In addition, two additional variables,
language level as indicated by the variable
level (three levels) and heritage or non‐heritage
students as indicated by the variable
heritage (two levels) were also of high
interest and were included in the results.
To analyze the impact of the MIC method
including the level and heritage variables, a 2
(group) 3 (level) / 2 (heritage) 4
(day) 2 (component) multi‐factor AN-OVA
was performed on the dependent
variables.
Results
Immediate Tests
All means and standard errors are reported
in Table 4. The results of the analysis
showed that treatment was significant,
F(1,106) ¼ 4.73, p 0.05, indicating that
the MIC method was more effective than the
traditional method for short‐term memory
of Chinese characters. Day was significant
for both groups, F(3,104) ¼ 49.42,
p 0.001. Generally speaking, student
performance was ranked from high to low
in the following order: Day 4 (student
familiar independent work), Day 2 (teach-er‐
cued instruction), Day 1 (teacher total
instruction), and Day 3 (student unfamiliar
independent work). Component was signif-icant,
F(1,106) ¼ 45.23, p 0.001, show-ing
that students performed significantly
better on the meaning tasks than on the
perception tasks. There was an inter-action
between group and component,
F(1,106) ¼ 7.59 p 0.01, which demon-strated
that the treatment group did espe-cially
well on the meaning‐related tasks as

412 FALL 2013
compared to the control group. Figure 1
displays the means of the immediate tests by
component and group. The interaction
between day and group was not significant,
F(3, 104) ¼ 1.17, p 0.05. This indicates
that the MIC method was equally effective
across the four instructional settings.
Figure 2 displays the means of the immedi-ate
tests by day and group.
Retention Tests
All means and standard errors are reported
in Table 5. Analyses of the retention tests
produced results that were similar to the
analyses for the immediate tests. The
treatment was significant, F(1, 106) ¼
6.33, p 0.05, indicating that the MIC
method was also effective for retention of
Chinese characters.
Day was significant for both groups, F(3,
104) ¼ 33,26, p 0.001. Generally speak-ing,
student performance was ranked from
high to low in the following order: Day 2
(teacher‐cued instruction), Day 4 (student
familiar independent work), Day 1 (teacher
total instruction), and Day 3 (student unfa-miliar
independent work). Component was
found to be significant, F(1,106) ¼ 158.09,
p 0.001, with students performing signifi-cantly
better on themeaning tasks than on the
perception tasks. Similar to the immediate
test, the retention analysis revealed a signifi-cant
interaction between group and compo-nent,
F(3, 104) ¼ 6.74, p 0.01, which
demonstrated that the treatment group did
especially well on meaning‐related tasks of
the retention test when compared to the
control group. The interaction between day
TABLE 4
Means (Standard Errors) of Immediate Tests
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Average
Means
Control Perception 9.59 (0.58) 12.48 (0.41) 10.55 (0.55) 13.15 (0.42) 11.44 (0.44)
Meaning 10.40 (0.58) 12.88 (0.42) 10.9 (0.56) 13.92 (0.33) 12.31 (0.45)
EM Means 9.99 (0.56) 12.68 (0.40) 10.72 (0.53) 13.53 (0.34) 11.73 (0.41)
Treatment Perception 10.67 (0.59) 13.27 (0.42) 11.82 (0.56) 13.47 (0.43) 12.03 (0.41)
Meaning 11.83 (0.59) 14.36 (0.43) 13.30 (0.57) 15.35 (0.33) 13.71 (0.42)
EM Means 11.26 (0.57) 13.82 (0.40) 12.56 (0.54) 14.41 (0.35) 13.01 (0.42)
Both Perception 10.13 (0.42) 12.88 (0.29) 11.18 (0.39) 13.31 (0.30) 11.88 (0.31)
Meaning 11.12 (0.42) 13.62 (0.30) 12.10 (0.40) 14.63 (0.23) 12.87 (0.29)
Avg. Means 10.62 (0.40) 13.25 (0.28) 11.64 (0.38) 13.97 (0.24) 12.43 (0.37)
FIGURE 1
Means of Immediate Tests, by Component and Group

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7UHDWPHQW


and group was not significant, F(3,
104) ¼ .26, p 0.01, indicating that the
MIC method was equally effective across the
four instructional settings.
Application Test
Twomonths later, studentswere tested on the
new characters they had learned from their
teachers since the completion of the experi-ment.
Chinese II students learned 29 charac-ters,
and Chinese III and Chinese IV students
each learned 44 characters. A similar applica-tion
test consisting of the perception and
meaning components of those characters was
given to students in both the control and
treatment groups. To make their scores
comparable, the percentage of correct scores
for data analysis was used.
The means of both the perception
(M ¼ 50.72%, SE ¼ 1.62%) and meaning
components (M ¼ 59.22%, SE ¼ 1.07%) for
the treatment group were higher than the
means of the control group (for the perception
component M ¼ 49.37%, SE ¼ 1.06%; for
the meaning component M ¼ 57.49%, SE
¼ 1.02%), but these differences were not
significant. For the perception component,
F(1, 102) ¼ .13, p 0.05, and for the mean-ing
component, F(1, 102) ¼ .09, p 0.05.
This result indicates that the treatment effect
of the MIC method disappeared in the
application test given two months later.
Level and Heritage Effect
Level was significant in both the immediate
and the retention tests, F(2, 106) ¼ 7.03,
FIGURE 2
Means of Immediate Tests, by Day and Group

'D 'D 'D 'D
0HDQ
RQWURO
7UHDWPHQW
TABLE 5
Means (Standard Errors) of Retention Tests
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Average
Means
Control Perception 4.77 (0.55) 5.56 (0.55) 3.67 (0.39) 4.98 (0.57) 4.74 (0.48)
Meaning 6.15 (0.65) 6.97 (0.60) 4.94 (0.52) 7.11 (0.64) 6.29 (0.55)
EM Means 5.46 (0.54) 6.26 (0.56) 4.30 (0.44) 6.04 (0.58) 5.52 (0.51)
Treatment Perception 6.37 (0.57) 7.07 (0.57) 4.98 (0.40) 6.26 (0.59) 6.17 (0.50)
Meaning 8.68 (0.67) 9.21 (0.62) 6.93 (0.54) 9.27 (0.67) 8.52 (0.57)
EM Means 7.53 (0.60) 8.14 (0.58) 5.96 (0.45) 7.76 (0.60) 7.35 (0.52)
Both Perception 5.57 (0.40) 6.31 (0.40) 4.33 (0.28) 5.62 (0.41) 5.46 (0.35)
Meaning 7.42 (0.47) 8.09 (0.43) 6.39 (0.37) 8.19 (0.46) 7.41 (0.40)
Avg. Means 6.49 (0.42) 7.20 (0.40) 5.13 (0.31) 6.90 (0.42) 6.50 (0.38)

414 FALL 2013
p 0.01, and F(2, 106) ¼ 10.63, p 0.001,
respectively. Higher‐level students per-formed
better than lower‐level students on
both the immediate and retention tests.
Furthermore, the analyses revealed that,
compared to Chinese III and Chinese IV
students,Chinese II students laggedbehindto
a greater extent on perception tasks when
compared to meaning tasks in the tests.
Heritage was a significant factor in both
the immediate and retention tests, F(1,
106) ¼ 22.73, p 0.001, and F(1, 106) ¼
45.31, p 0.001, respectively. Heritage
students not only performed better than
non‐heritage students on both tests, but the
former also showed less of a performance
decrement in the retention tests. Similar to
the level variable, compared to heritage
students, non‐heritage students lagged be-hind
more on perception tasks than on
meaning tasks in the tests.
Discussion
Immediate Learning and Retention
The results of the study support a cognitive
interpretation of the role of MIC in immedi-ate
recall and retention of information
(Anderson, 2005; Chase Simon, 1973;
Gobet, Retschitzki,de Voogt, 2004; Gobet
Simon, 1998; Mandler Ritchey, 1977).
In converting Chinese characters into more
meaningful material, the MIC method first
informed students that Chinese characters
are not random symbols but are grounded
upon historical stories and possess mean-ingful
interpretation. In this sense, mean-ingful
interpretation provided students with
a framework and contextual clues to learn
and retain Chinese characters. The other
element of the MIC method, chunking and
association between chunks, was also sup-ported
by the results of the study. When
learning compound Chinese characters,
students in the treatment group first decom-posed
the characters into familiar chunks
(bujian) and then proceeded to unite the
characters by connecting the writing and
meaning. As Taft and Forster (1975)
claimed, the obvious advantage of this
kind of decomposition procedure is an
economy of memory storage. Instead of
memorizing more than 10 strokes, students
only need to retain two or three chunks.
Although the initial process may be more
tedious for students who are still in the
process of learning the chunks, the task
becomes easier as students become exposed
to and remember chunks.
The effectiveness of the MIC method is
also consistent with studies that investigated
the relationship between radical knowledge
and Chinese character acquisition (Shen,
2000; Shen Ke, 2007; Taft Chung,
1999; Wang et al., 2004). Although there is
no literature on the MIC method in
particular, teaching radical knowledge mir-rors
the MIC method because a radical is a
type of Chinese character chunk with
meaning or sound indications. The findings
of the MIC method are not only consistent
with radical knowledge theory but also
extend its benefits to retaining the pronun-ciation
and meaning of Chinese characters.
The findings reported here also demon-strate
that students are better at learning and
retaining the meaning components of char-acters
as compared to the perception
component. This is consistent with Shen
(2010), who reported that students had
more difficulty learning the sounds and
shapes of characters than they did learning
the character’s meanings. One conclusion
that can be drawn from this finding is that
language instruction should aim to have
students attend to strategies for internalizing
the sound and writing of Chinese characters.
Long‐Term Effects
A puzzling problem to emerge from the
study was the absence of a significant long‐term
effect of the MIC method when
students were given an application test
two months following the experimental
manipulation. It is not clear why students
did not retain and transfer the benefits of the
MIC method when learning new Chinese
characters. It is possible that, for long‐term
memory to be maintained, some level of
rehearsal of the material is needed (Atkinson

Shiffrin, 1968; Baddeley, 1986; Bower,
1982). During the two‐month interval
between the experiment and the application
test, the Chinese classroom teachers contin-ued
to use the traditional stroke‐order rote
memorization method to teach Chinese
characters and thus no overt rehearsal had
taken place. Thus it is conceivable that the
waning of the MIC method in the applica-tion
test could be attributable to both a lack
of rehearsal and, possibly, to interference
from the rehearsal of an opposing method of
learning. The other possibility could be that
the short duration of the experiment was not
sufficient to effect a change in students’
strategic learning orientation, something
that would have to be nurtured over time
through principled pedagogical interven-tions.
Therefore, it is important that the
teacher consistently act as a facilitator to
encourage students to incorporate the MIC
method in their Chinese character learning.
Support for this can be found in Everson
(2011), who stated in his synthesis of the
literature on learning character languages:
As well, given the variable nature of
students’ ability to actually use these
components successfully, it appears this
is no longer nice‐to‐know information
to be taught from a cultural or historical
perspective, but information that must
be woven systematically into the fabric
of Chinese reading classroom pedagogy.
(pp. 263–264)
Day Effect
Generally speaking, Day 2 and Day 4 were
ranked at the top in both the immediate‐recall
and retention tests, which indicates
that teacher‐cued instruction and familiar
independent learning were more effective for
learning Chinese characters in this study.
This conclusion is consistent with Bransford,
Franks, Vye, and Sherwood’s theory (1989)
of “Wisdom can’t be told.” According to
Bransford et al. (1989), when students
were instructed on knowledge and prob-lem‐
solving models for learning, students
could think of the knowledge and the models
mechanically but were not able to transfer the
knowledge or model creatively to new
situations. The more effective method, as
discussed by Bransford et al. (1989), was the
problem‐oriented acquisition procedure, in
which students, under a teacher’s tutelage,
receive extensive opportunities to manipu-late
objects and problems by themselves.
Shen’s study (2007) on learning Chinese
characters also reinforced this result, show-ing
that, after being introduced to themethod
of deep processing, student self‐motivated
elaboration could be as effective as teacher‐guided
elaboration in the long run.
Subgroup Effects
No significant interaction was found be-tween
level and heritage and treatment. In
addition, the results indicated that the MIC
method was equally effective both for lower‐level
and higher‐level learners as well as for
heritage and non‐heritage learners. On the
other hand, the results of the subgroup
analyses also demonstrated that lower‐level
and non‐heritage students showed the
largest performance decrement on the
immediate test of Day 3, when they were
required to conduct independent learning of
the characters for the first time. Another
finding was that lower‐level and non‐heri-tage
students lagged behind on the percep-tion
tasks rather than on the meaning tasks
when compared to the higher‐level and
heritage students. Thus, when using the
MIC method to teach Chinese characters,
teachers should provide more scaffolding to
lower‐level and non‐heritage students and
pay particular attention to improving stu-dents’
abilities on perception tasks (pro-nouncing
and writing the characters).
Implications for Teaching Practices
This study provides a number of sugges-tions
for teaching Chinese characters and
possibly has implications for teaching other
languages that use logographic characters
(e.g., Japanese). First of all, the MIC method
differs from other methods that use radical
knowledge in teaching Chinese characters

416 FALL 2013
—although it integrates the knowledge of
radicals as a way to ensure meaningful
interpretation, it embeds the following three
key elements: (1) meaningful background
knowledge (origination and types of
Chinese characters, radical knowledge);
(2) chunking (bujian); and (3) association
among characters consisting of the same
radicals or chunks.
Second, when using the MIC method in
teaching Chinese characters, the teacher
takes on the role of facilitator. To be more
specific, the following suggestions emerge:
1. Teachers need to clearly introduce the
MIC method and demonstrate to stu-dents
through abundant examples how
the method can aid in memorizing
Chinese characters.
2. When a radical or a bujian first appears in
a character, teachers should highlight it
so that students can store this informa-tion
as nodes in a memory net and later
activate these memory nodes when
encountering characters with the same
radical or bujian.
3. In daily lessons, teachers can instruct
students on how to connect Chinese
characters with similar radicals or bujian
together, thus enabling the activation of
prior knowledge, the radical or bujian
that students have learned and stored in a
memory net.
4. Teachers should not impose their own
interpretation of every character on
students as this inhibits students’ critical
thinking skills and deep processing of
characters. In this sense, teachers should
encourage students to independently use
the MIC method to learn characters and
provide scaffolding to students when
needed.
5. Students need constant exposure to and
rehearsal in using the MIC method.
Teachers need to provide ample oppor-tunities
for students to use this method in
class as well as in self‐study at home.
Third, with regard to when to introduce
the MIC method and how to provide
differentiated instruction among students,
results of the study indicated that this
method could be introduced to students
by their second year of Chinese instruction.
It is presumed that, by learning the MIC
method at an earlier stage of their acquisi-tion
of Chinese characters, students could
also benefit in their overall learning of
characters.
Limitations and Implications for
Future Research
This study has several limitations. First,
from the first day of the study, students
knew that they were participating in an
experiment. Although they remained in
their original classrooms, they had a new
teacher, new material to learn, and a new
structure of lessons that only focused on
character learning. Second, due to the
possible interference of the method for
learning characters that was used by the
students’ regular teacher, MIC’s long‐term
effects could not be demonstrated.
To overcome the above limitations,
instead of randomly assigning students to
different conditions, future research could
assign teachers to different treatment and
control conditions. Teachers in the treat-ment
group could be trained on the MIC
method, and teachers in the control group
could be directed to only use a traditional
method to teach Chinese characters. Stu-dents
in both groups could then be tracked
longitudinally to measure their performance
in learning Chinese characters. This re-search
design simulates a real‐life classroom
setting and could reveal whether the MIC
method has long‐term effects on Chinese
character learning.
Finally, this study did not investigate
the relationship between types of Chinese
characters and the intervention effect. For
example, because the MIC method empha-sizes
meaningful interpretation, the method
may be more effective for transparent
Chinese characters, which can be inter-preted
more easily than nontransparent
Chinese characters. Other characteristics

of Chinese characters that may influence the
effect of the intervention include number of
strokes, frequency, and whether they are
introduced in context. Furthermore, only
simplified characters were selected in this
study. As simplified and traditional charac-ters
bear strong resemblance to each other,
our hypothesis is that the MIC method can
also promote the learning of traditional
characters. However, this should be studied
to ensure that there is no differential effect of
MIC instruction between simplified and
traditional character learning.
Notes
1. There are two types of Chinese charac-ters,
simplified and traditional, with the
former used mainly in Mainland China
and Singapore, and the latter used in
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Simpli-fied
characters originated from the
traditional characters, and they bear a
strong resemblance to each other. As the
majority of the Chinese‐speaking popu-lation
uses simplified characters as the
written language, this study also used the
simplified characters in every aspect of
the experiment.
2. Transparent characters refer to charac-ters
where meaning and sound radicals
match with the meanings and sounds of
the characters (see Appendix A, Part I,
for examples of phono‐semantic com-pound
characters).
3. Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones
plus a “toneless” tone. Identical pronun-ciations
that carry different tones in
Chinese represent different characters
and convey differences in meaning.
4. Definitions of the language levels are
provided at http://www.languagetesting.
com/scale.htm#novice_low.
5. Humans are able to hold 7 2 items in
memory (Miller, 1956). Therefore, we
chose eight characters to teach per day.
6. There were three different instructional
differences used across four days: teacher
total instruction (Day 1), teacher‐cued
instruction (Day 2), and student self‐manipulation
(Days 3 and 4). Although
on Days 3 and 4 the instructional
strategies were both student self‐manip-ulation,
the effects could be different, as
on Day 4 students might feel more
comfortable and familiar with indepen-dent
work after Day 3’s exposure.
Therefore, Day 3 and Day 4 were treated
separately as two levels of the variable.
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Submitted April 14, 2013
Accepted June 16, 2013
APPENDIX A
Meaningful Interpretation and Chunking (MIC)
Part I: Composition of Chinese Characters
Note: As the phonetic loan characters and derivative cognates make up less than 1% of
Chinese characters, they were excluded from instruction and handout for the experimental
group.
1. Pictograms ( xiàng xíng “form imitation”)
Thought to be the oldest types of characters, pictographs were originally pictures of things.
During the past 5,000 years or so they have become simplified and stylized.
e.g.,
2. Simple ideograms ( zhıˇ shì “indication”)
Ideograms express an abstract idea through an iconic form, including iconic modification
of pictographic characters.
e.g.,
ben, “root”—a tree ( mù) with the base indicated by an extra stroke.
mò, “apex”—the reverse of (ben), a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.

420 FALL 2013
3. Ideogrammic compounds ( huì yì “joined meaning”)
In ideogrammic compounds, two or more pictographic or ideographic characters are
combined to suggest a third meaning.
2 ¼ 3 ¼ þ ¼
lín sen xiu
two trees ! grove three trees ! forest a man leaning against a tree ! rest
4. Phono‐semantic compound characters xíng sheng “form and sound”)
These are often called radical‐phonetic characters. A phono‐semantic character is
composed of a phonetic and a meaning radical.
Meaning Pronunciation Compound
stone zhuan zhuan “brick”
vehicle zhuan zhua9n “turn”
hand ba ba9 “hold, grasp”
hand bái pai “clap, hit”
Note: The pronunciation of does not exactly match the pronunciation of the phonetic
radical , but they share the same final ai.
5. Phonetic loan characters ( jia9jiè “borrowing; making use of”)
Phonetic loan characters are characters that are “borrowed” to write another
homophonous or near‐homophonous morpheme.
Pictograph or
ideograph
Original
word Secondary word
bei “north” bèi “back (of the body)”
yào “to want” yao “waist”
sha9o “few” sha “sand”
6. Derivative cognates ( zhua9n zhù “reciprocal meaning”)
New character for
original word
It may refer to characters that have similar meanings and often the same etymological root
but have diverged in pronunciation and meaning. For example, the characters la9o “old”
and ka9o “a test” derive from a common etymological root and the characters differ only in
the modification of one part.
Part II: Chunking
The 132 most common bujian (chunks) used in 3,500 frequently used Chinese characters
(Chinese Linguistics Bureau, 2005):

Part III: Associations Between Radicals and Chunks
Read the following Chinese character sets and circle the common radicals or chunks shared by
the characters. Can you add another character sharing the same radical or chunk?
Tip
The big secret here is: Meaningful Interpretation þ Chunking! Also, there is no right or
wrong in using this method. Whatever works for you works best. Sometimes, you can create
your own way to memorize the character. And associating characters consisting of the same
radicals or chunks can further improve your memory.
APPENDIX B
Character Selection Criteria
Characters learned each day of the experiment were selected based on the following criteria:
1. Human Memory Capacity
Rationale: Humans are able to hold 7 2 items in memory (Miller, 1956). Therefore, we
chose eight characters to teach per day.
2. Number of Strokes/Density
Rationale: According to the Dictionary of Modern Chinese Characters (2005, p. 155), the
number of average strokes of the 1,000 most frequent characters is 7.958. Therefore,
for each character set, I selected four characters at seven strokes and below, and four
characters at eight strokes and above. There are two characters for each category: five
strokes and below, six to seven strokes, eight to nine strokes, and 10 strokes and above.
3. Frequency
Rationale: Modern Chinese Character Frequency List (http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese‐computing/
statistics/char/list.php?Which¼MO)
Characters are all selected from Nihao IV, and most are among the 1,000 most frequent
characters (more than 60% are among the 500 most frequent characters). In each character
set,
Frequency top 100 and below: one character
Frequency top 101–500: four characters
Frequency top 501–1000: two characters
Frequency top 1001–2000: one character
Note: There is an exception on day 2. On day 2, there is no character ranking beyond 1,000,
but , ranking 988th, is very close to 1000th.
4. Transparency of Phonetic‐Semantic Compounds
Two to three characters in each set are not transparent and hard to analyze (highlighted)

422 FALL 2013
5. Learning in context
In each character set, there are four characters that can make up two words (each word of
two characters). The other four characters are introduced not in a word set, but
individually.
APPENDIX C
Quiz
Section 1: Please write down the characters you hear and their meanings in English.
Section 2: Please write down the pinyin and meaning of each character
Character Pinyin Meaning

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