The purposes of this study were to explore the effects of a character identification program for 20 elementary school students with reading disabilities. Independent variable was this character identification program that consisted of 80 high-frequency radicals/orthographic components of Chinese characters. Dependent variables were students’ performances on characters reading and writing, oral reading fluency, and radical awareness. For comparison, another 20 average students were matched with reading disabled students by chronological ages as a contrast group and were administered with pre-and post-tests only. Results indicated that reading disabled children performed well on immediate and short-term radicals identification and high-frequency characters writing tests. The growth rates of oral reading fluency, character recognition and writing scores were similar between experimental and contrast groups. However, reading disabled students’ achievement levels on these tests were still behind. In the posttest, reading disabled students’ performances on basic character recognition and radical awareness tests were closer to the performances of contrast group. The character identification program was beneficial to reading disabled students, however, younger students improved much more on oral reading fluency than older students did.