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Despite the enormity of its quantity, printed or written forms of Chinese characters are composed from a limited number of common components. For example, the characters for pond( ), lake( ), stream( ), river( ), sea( ) and ocean( ) all contain a component in common, a three-dot component representing water. When this clue is explicitly highlighted to the students, the learning of Chinese characters can be greatly enhanced. Using computer to help students to develop this kind of structural awareness about language learning has not yet been thoroughly examined. This paper reports on the design of CALL software based on the pedagogic method to help students to develop the higher order skills to analyze and categorize Chinese characters by using components. The result of our classroom experiment has shown supportive evidence on the feasibility and the need of integrating the software with an affective and contextual way of teaching Chinese characters.

Effective teaching should focus the attention of learners to its essential aspects. It follows that instructional software can be designed in such a way that allows learners to experience the important variations in the critical aspects of the content to be learned. This paper reports on the experience of designing such special kinds of instructional learning objects for the learning of Chinese characters. The design of these learning objects takes into consideration not only what Chinese characters are all about but also how learners commonly make errors while they learn to write the characters. Out of the analysis of these learners' errors, variations in the structural features of Chinese characters were pulled out and embodied in the design of the learning objects. Learners tinkering with the learning objects can thus implicitly develop a sense of the structural features or regularity of Chinese characters, which most importantly should prepare the learners to learn more new characters in the future. The main proposal of this paper is the notion of this variation-affording instructional software that allows learners to attend to the essential aspects of what is to be learned. Furthermore, the idea of the learning object also differs from other instructional software in its small, selfcontained and reusable nature, such that teachers can flexibly embed the learning objects into their own teaching materials.

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