Designing CALL for learning Chinese characters

Despite the enormity of its quantity, printed or written forms of Chinese characters are composed from a limited number of common components. For example, the characters for pond(池), lake(湖), stream(江), river(河), sea(海) and ocean(洋) all contain a component in common, a three-dot component representing water. When this clue is explicitly highlighted to the students, the learning of Chinese characters can be greatly enhanced. Using computer to help students to develop this kind of structural awareness about language learning has not yet been thoroughly examined. This paper reports on the design of CALL software based on the pedagogic method to help students to develop the higher order skills to analyze and categorize Chinese characters by using components. The result of our classroom experiment has shown supportive evidence on the feasibility and the need of integrating the software with an affective and contextual way of teaching Chinese characters.