Decoding Strategies Used by Chinese Primary School Children

Abstract

This study explored the ways Chinese children remember and decode characters. Thirty primary school children in two cities in China reported how they recognized and remembered individual characters. Of the ten strategy categories identified from the children's responses, three that analyzed character structure dominated. These three categories, as well as several others, emphasized visual processing rather than phonetic processing and suggest emphasis on visual perception. The first-, second-, and third-grade children readily divided characters into structural components and individual strokes. The study concludes that learning written Chinese engaged these children in using semiotic systems unique to their written code and distinct from those usually emphasized in English literacy learning.

Interviewer: Is [the character] right or not?

Child: No.

Interviewer: How do you know that?

Child: Because the end part of it shouldn't be this horizontal bar, but four dots.

First Grade Student, China