Effective Ways in Teaching Chinese Characters Without Phonetic Clues

Learning Chinese characters is a challenge for most English-speaking students. Considering both the learning objective and the learners’ ability, we developed the multiple teaching strategies to make learning Chinese characters more enjoyable. Based on the analysis of 947 Chinese characters without phonetic clues, we have devised some relevant teaching strategies in learning different types of Chinese characters and found that the single-component Chinese characters are best learned through the graphic method while the component-based teaching strategy is effective for teaching structural awareness, meaning, and radical position.