How does the dual-focus approach enhance learning Chinese characters

The dual-focus approach enhances learning Chinese characters by integrating instruction at both the character and word levels. This approach goes beyond typical whole-word instruction by focusing on characters for their pronunciation and words for their meaning. Research with beginner Chinese learners demonstrated that while word-level pronunciation and meaning learning were comparable between traditional word-focus instruction and dual-focus instruction, the dual-focus method significantly improved character pronunciation and facilitated transfer to learning new words. This suggests that learning subword components, such as individual characters, helps learners acquire the systematic structure of the Chinese writing system, which in turn enhances overall reading and word learning effectiveness.

Specifically, the dual-focus approach aligns with the Character-Word Dual Function model, which highlights the importance of understanding both the characters’ phonetic and semantic roles within words. By teaching learners to attend to these dual functions—characters at the subword level and words at the lexical level—this method fosters better character recognition, pronunciation, and meaning acquisition, ultimately supporting more efficient and deeper literacy development in Chinese as a second language. ^{1, 2}

References

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