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Existing empirical research has demonstrated the positive effects of flipping the classroom to improve student motivation and achievement by flipping in-class learning content to pre-class. However, the flipped classroom approach requires that students be engaged and motivated in the pre-class stage to ensure that the in-class learning activities run smoothly. Previous studies have highlighted the difficulties that students often encounter when trying to learn Chinese characters in Chinese language classes, especially those who are in the early stages of learning the language. Therefore, in this study, a gamified interactive e-book was developed and used in a flipped classroom for Chinese character learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, a pre-test and post-test control group experimental design was used. The participants were 90 s-grade students from a public primary school in Zhengzhou, China, who were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group: the students who used a gamified interactive e-book in a Chinese character learning flipped classroom (GIEFC group), the students who used a traditional flipped classroom (TFC group), and the students who used a traditional teaching classroom (TTC group). The experimental results indicated that students in the GIEFC group scored higher than those in the TFC and TTC groups in terms of learning achievements and motivation. In addition, the experimental results also demonstrated the positive effects of gamified interactive e-books in flipped classroom learning. Future research could explore a variety of different types of game elements as well as the extension of research to other subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is controversy around whether presenting sub-character units such as radicals and strokes are beneficial to L2 Chinese learning. The present study explored the effects of radical markings (i.e., marked radicals with different colors) and stroke order animations on learning Chinese characters. Forty Chinese L2 learners with native alphabetic languages were divided into high-and low-level groups. They were first required to learn Chinese characters under four conditions either: (a) presented radical markings with stroke animations; (b) presented no radical markings with stroke animations; (c) presented radical markings without stroke animations; or (d) presented neither radical markings nor stroke animations. After learning, the participants were given character recognition and charactermeaning matching tests. Results showed that the presentation of radical markings increased the participants' reaction times in the character recognition test and decreased their recognition accuracy. Moreover, presenting stroke order animations also decreased the participants' accuracy in recognizing characters. Beyond that, presenting radical markings and stroke order animations had no significant influence on character-meaning matching tests. These results indicate that providing radical and stroke information might interfere with character learning instead of facilitating character learning. The results suggest that excessive visual information introduced in the learning process may increase L2 learners' cognition load. Also, the findings contribute to theoretical arguments about the analytic and holistic processing of Chinese characters and the pedagogical implications for teaching Chinese as a second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on Chinese dictation difficulties have focused on visual processing and phonological processing. In recent decades, attention has shifted to the ability to bind visual and auditory information. However, such studies are scarce and rarely focus on how this ability influences children’s learning and writing of Chinese characters. In this study, a group of children with Chinese dictation difficulties and a control group without such difficulties were instructed to learn rarely used Chinese characters under three learning modes: grapheme learning, syllable learning, and grapheme-syllable learning. Participants’ learning time and writing accuracy were recorded under each learning mode. Findings showed that under the grapheme learning mode, learning time and writing accuracy failed to differ significantly between the two groups. However, under the grapheme-syllable learning mode, the writing accuracy of children with dictation difficulties was significantly lower than controls. These findings, taken together, suggested that for children with dictation difficulties, learning graphemes and syllables at the same time did not improve their writing performance as much as the controls. Under the syllable learning mode, learning time and writing accuracy failed to differ significantly between the two groups. The findings contributed to a better understanding of the Chinese dictation difficulties.