Hc Lam

Children's stroke sequence errors in writing Chinese characters

Each Chinese character is a two dimensional logograph and if character writing is seen as drawing a diagram, then there is no obvious ‘correct sequence’ in the writing process. However, over the ages and to this day, Chinese children have been taught the proper stroke sequence for forming the characters based on some calligraphic rules when they begin to learn to write in Chinese. The rationale for the teaching of stroke sequence has traditionally been argued on the basis of facilitating better calligraphy and as a memory aid for the exact reproduction of the correct form of the character. This paper reports on a study that tries to determine how far young children can master the correct stroke sequences in writing and the common kinds of errors children made. It further explores the importance of and the possible educational implications for the teaching of stroke sequences in the teaching of handwriting based on the empirical results.

The Introduction of a Computerised Network to Support Educational Change in Hong Kong

In 1998, there was a major shift in the medium of instruction in Hong Kong secondary schools from English to Chinese. This change had many educational advantages. However, its implementation was not without problems, and many of the problems were non-trivial. This article reports the work of a computer network, specifically established to support the educational change and discuss about the strategy to provide effective support to educational changes through computer networking, including issues on service positions, content provision and the development of network culture interaction.

Teacher empowerment and minimalist design

Although the use of ICT in education has been strongly advocated with a vision of bringing a paradigm shift to education, observational studies and surveys in general indicate that the actual impact of ICT on classroom teaching and learning has been limited. This paper attempts to provide a discussion of the underlying problems, and reports an experience which seems to indicate how the situation may differ if teacher empowerment is taken as a primary concern in the development of ICT in education.

Designing CALL for learning Chinese characters: CALL for learning Chinese characters

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(池), lake(湖), stream(江), river(河), sea(海) and ocean(洋) 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.