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The present study aims to investigate the effect of word recognition strategies that incorporated characteristics of Chinese characters on enhancing the word recognition learning of grade two children. The present study adopted an action research design, where a curriculum of sixteen lessons was designed. The curriculum entailed three units, word recognition through etymology, radicals, and semantic-phonetic compounds. The activity process and evaluation conducted post-implementation revealed that the curriculum was not only conducive to enhancing students’ interest in learning novel characters, but also effective in consolidating the learning of characters’ forms, phonetics, and semantics. However, limitations and areas for improvement were also identified throughout the research process. Regarding word recognition through etymology, elucidation of words’ origins and transformations not only augmented students’ perception of novel characters, but also promoted memorization and comprehension of the forms and semantics; moreover, the strategy broadened students’ learning horizons. However, it was not significantly effective in homophone teaching, suggesting that additional teaching activities are essential. Regarding word recognition through radicals, the strategy assisted students in understanding the characteristics of radicals first, then their relevance to novel characters, which ultimately diminished learning errors; however, the efficacy in comprehending and classifying words with similar semantics and the same radicals was not as expected. Regarding word recognition through semantic-phonetic compounds, students were able to apprehend the principles of pictograms represent semantics and phonetic components represent sounds; moreover, they were able to discern word clusters with similar phonetic components. However, the semantic-phonetic compound teaching in the present study focused only on word clusters with phonetic components that highly represent their phonetics; consequently, the results cannot be generalized to semantic-phonetic compound learning of words of low representations. Even though the present curriculum is imperfect, students were indeed able to formulate incipient concepts of Chinese character formation throughout the process. Therefore, the researcher suggests that relevant word-recognition strategies can be incorporated in lower grade classes to assist students formulate word-construction rules, so as to facilitate their development of automatic word recognition, which ultimately results in immense word-recognition. Lastly, conducting the present action research has resulted in an enhanced professional skill in word recognition teaching of the researcher.
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