CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH DESIGN
3.2 Materials and Methods
The current study is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal due to the time limit.
The participants’ semantic knowledge of Chinese characters was measured by two comprehension tasks while the phonetic knowledge was measured by one comprehension task. Furthermore, a reading comprehension task was employed to estimate their reading ability.
Many previous studies of radical awareness in children also adopted a cross-sectional approach by recruiting different children from different age groups.
Among them, Shu and Anderson (1997) used a comprehension task to tap semantic radical knowledge and Shu et al. (2000) used a production task to measure phonetic radical knowledge. Ho et al. (2003) further employed five comprehension tasks on semantic radical knowledge as well as three comprehension tasks and two production tasks on phonetic radical knowledge. The current study differs from the previous research in the depth and width of the investigation. The use of semantic knowledge was not only examined in the context of single- or two-character words as in the previous studies, but also in the context of sentences. The sentence context simulates children’s reading experience more and can better reveal the contribution of semantic radical knowledge during actual reading. Furthermore, both semantic and phonetic radical knowledge was measured by comprehension tasks to ensure a comparison of
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their relative development and importance in reading acquisition on an equal basis.
Concerning the measurement of reading ability, Shu and Anderson (1997) and Shu et al. (2000) only relied on teachers’ ratings of the students participating in their studies while Ho et al. (2003) used two tests for word reading and sentence comprehension respectively. In the present study, reading ability extended from the word-level and sentence-level to the discourse-level. Children’s ability to comprehend whole texts was measured and discussed in relation to their radical awareness.
Every child received four tasks, including a semantic task in words (ST-W), a semantic task in sentences (ST-S), a phonetic task (PT), and a reading comprehension task.1 The classification and number of target characters used in ST-W, ST-S and PT for each grade is outlined in Table 3-2. And Appendix A further presents the classification and distribution of target characters for Grades 2, 4 and 6 in Parts A, B and C respectively.
1 The phonetic task was designed only in the word-level but not in the sentence-level context because the activation of the phonetic information conveyed by the phonetic radicals was assumed to be less likely to be affected by context differences.
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Table 3-2 The Classification and Number of Target Characters
Type Character
The characters at F, F-1 and F-2 levels for each grade were selected according to Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guidelines by the MOE. The guidelines dictate the number of characters students from each grade should know, and the characters in the present study came from Guóyǔcídiǎn jiǎnbiānběn biānjízīliào zìcípín tǒngjìbàogào [Report on the Frequency of Characters and Words of the Editing Material for the Concise Edition of Mandarin Dictionary] published by the MOE in 1997. F level characters for the second grade were from the first 800 frequent characters in the report, F-1 level characters from the 801st to the 1,800th characters, and F-2 level characters from the 1,801st to the 2,700th characters. For the fourth grade, F level characters came from the 801st to the 1,800th characters in the report, F-1 level characters from the 1,801st to the 2,700th characters, and F-2 level character from the 2,701st to the 4,500th characters. As for the sixth grade, F level characters were from the 1,801st to the 2,700th characters in the report, F-1 level characters from the 2,701st to the 4,500th
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characters, and F-2 level character from the 4,501st to the 5,731st characters.
Concerning meaning, the transparent characters have semantic radicals that are helpful in figuring out the meaning of the whole characters while the semantic radicals of the opaque characters contribute little or no cue to the meaning of the whole characters. Turning to pronunciation, the regular characters have phonetic radicals which are pronounced the same as the whole characters, whereas the phonetic radicals of the irregular characters have different pronunciation compared to the whole characters.
In ST-W, a test item consisted of a two-character Chinese word, in which the target character was represented by a blank, and two Chinese characters were provided as alternatives to fill in the blank. The two character alternatives fell in the same frequency range, and one was the target while the other was a distractor with the same phonetic radical but different semantic radical compared to the target. An example target, “ 清 ” (qīng, ‘clear’), therefore had the distractor “ 情 ” (qíng,
‘emotion’). The job of the participants was to select one of the two characters that best fit into the blank of each word, and then wrote the number of the chosen character in the parentheses before each test item. There were 36 test items for each grade level, and one of them is in Table 3-3. The complete ST-W can be found in Appendix B, which consists of Parts A, B and C for Grades 2, 4, and 6, respectively.
Table 3-3 A Test Item of Semantic Task in Words (ST-W)
（ ）＿＿澈ㄔㄜˋ。 （① 清 ② 情）
ST-S was similar in form to ST-W. The only difference was that a test item was a sentence, rather than a word in isolation. Therefore, in ST-S, the participants also had
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to choose one out of the two alternatives to fill in the blank representing the target character in a sentence, and then they needed to write down the number of the chosen character in the parentheses before each test item. A total of 36 test items were designed for each grade level. While Table 3-4 provides one of them, Appendix C presents the complete ST-S with Parts A, B and C specifically for the second, fourth and sixth graders.
Table 3-4 A Test Item of Semantic Task in Sentences (ST-S)
（ ）這ㄓㄜˋ條ㄊㄧㄠˊ河ㄏㄜˊ很ㄏㄣˇ＿＿澈ㄔㄜˋ，有ㄧㄡˇ很ㄏㄣˇ多ㄉㄨㄛ魚ㄩˊ。 （① 情 ② 清）
As for PT, each test item was a two-character Chinese word, in which the target character was in the quotation marks, and two alternatives written in Zhùyīnfúhào were given to represent the pronunciation of the target character. One pronunciation alternative was the correct one, and the other was a distractor. For the regular targets, the distractor was the pronunciation of a character having the same phonetic radical but different semantic radical from the target itself. For instance, the pronunciation of
“情” (qíng, ‘emotion’) was a distractor for the target “清” (qīng, ‘clear’). As for the irregular targets, the distractor was the pronunciation of the phonetic radical of the target itself. The pronunciation of “也” (yě, ‘also’) thus served as a distractor for the target “ 地 ” (dì, ‘ground’). The participants were instructed to identify the pronunciation of the target and wrote the number of the chosen pronunciation in the parentheses before each test item. Each grade also had 36 test items to complete. One of the items can be seen in Table 3-5, and the complete PT resides in Appendix D with Parts A, B and C particularly for pupils from the second, fourth and sixth grades.
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Table 3-5 A Test Item of Phonetic Task (PT)
（ ）「清」澈ㄔㄜˋ。 （① ㄑㄧㄥ ② ㄑㄧㄥˊ）
The three grades respectively received three different versions of ST-W, ST-S, and PT, containing target characters appropriate to their grade level. Besides, the test items were accompanied by Zhùyīnfúhào for the second graders to ensure their understanding. Finally, Zhōngwén yuèdú lǐjiě cèyàn [Chinese Reading Comprehension Test] (2002) published by the MOE was used to measure the participants’ reading ability. The test applies to the second to the sixth graders and can help identify children with reading difficulty. It involves 12 passages and six to nine related questions for each passage. The same reading comprehension test was administered to all three grades. And an Example Item of Chinese Reading Comprehension Test can be found in Appendix E.
3.3 Procedures