Effects of cue and instructor demonstration on the learning of Chinese characters for Chinese as a second language beginners.

This study purports to investigate the effects of cue and instructor demonstration on Chinese as a second language (CSL) beginners' Chinese character learning performance, cognitive load, learning motivation and attitude. In the current research, 100 CSL beginners were randomly assigned to four experimental groups, i.e., instructor demonstration cued character, instructor demonstration non-cued character, non-instructor demonstration cued character and non-instructor demonstration non-cued character. Participants were instructed to watch an instructional video and subsequently complete a post-test and a questionnaire. The results show that (1) in the presence of instructor demonstration, the cued characters can noticeably reduce CSL beginners' cognitive load and enhance their learning attitudes towards character learning, enabling them to achieve better performance in character stroke but not in radical and structure, and (2) in the presence of cued characters, the instructor demonstration can noticeably reduce CSL beginners' cognitive load and increase their learning motivation and attitudes towards character learning but can not improve their character learning performance. The findings have significant implications for educators and instructional designers of Chinese and other non-alphabetic languages, such as Kanji and Hangul.