Techquest Project Description – Final

The Four common places of education:

·      Setting: Chinese International School (Full MAC platform across all labs and classrooms)

·      Teachers: Elementary School Chinese teachers

·      Students: All Chinese International School Elementary School Students (Yes, all! At this school Chinese language learning is mandatory.)

·      Subject Matter: Chinese

Problem Background:

The Chinese language is made up of over 50,000 characters. The typical newspaper regularly uses 8,000 characters. The typical high school student needs to graduate with a mastery of no less than 2,000 characters. As a result, much of early language education is devoted to the learning of new characters. Based on my 6 years of experience in a dual-language classroom, here are my personal observations of the K-5 Chinese language classroom:

1.     Be it as a full class or in small groups, instruction tends towards demonstration of how to write a character (in the precise order of the strokes in some form (either in a book, on the board, etc..).

2.     Students “learn” the stroke order through repeated practice drills and various methods of rote memorization (Flash cards, math-like drill software, pneumonic tricks).

3.     Both the enormity of characters covered per grade level (and because it seems there are just so many ways to teach the physical writing of a character), much of Chinese language instruction approach follows a didactic model which enables efficient transfer of a large body of information from teacher to student.[1]

4.     Assessment predominantly falls in the camps of weekly written tests and quizzes (a la spelling test dictations)

5.     Pedagogy seems to vary little across student age and grade level, just the complexity of the characters change.

6.     Reinforcement of lessons with HW produced mixed results due to a very culturally mixed school. Students with at least 1 Chinese-speaking parent (or tutor) fared the best. It was clear that students who did not have the language support at home often had more trouble completing HW and grasping the tones.

The Need or Opportunity:

This type of instruction and learning likely favors a certain type of learner, one who can deal with a rather linear type of instruction and reproduce the finished character at will. The opportunities for technology in this traditional teaching arena are threefold:

1.     To reinforce the classroom content, possibly helping to vary the teaching methodology, which would help both students and the teachers who had to deliver this content.

2.     To vary the content presentation, as well as make it more engaging through the use of multimedia inputs.

3.     Character input methods vary widely. More and more, they are based on the western phonetic alphabet. Once a student inputs a letter, all common characters starting with that sound pop up on the screen and they need to choose the proper character. This is great for inputting, but not necessary good for students who are still trying to learn how to write the character. I am personally learning that is it pretty easy to recognize a character, but much harder to write it from a blank piece of paper. Finding an input method that reinforces writing (as opposed to the recognition) would help early language learners greatly.

Lastly, if character-based languages like Chinese are ultimately resigned to a certain level of rote learning, an opportunity exists to at least try to individualize some aspects of the learning. If the individualized assessment programming is truly intuitive, it may help teachers better diagnose student trouble areas.

Proposed Solution (MAC-based per Chinese International School): My goal is to help my old school in its search for effective Chinese language computer instruction in their new MAC platform. 

GOALS (previously published)	TOOL UNDER CONSIDERATION (new)	Additional Resources (None – All currently exists at school)
Identifying the best program out there that can help support diversity in teaching pedagogy as well as support differing student learning styles.	Skritter.com	Computer Lab / Classroom computers with broadband internet access to use web-based Skritter.com. Students will need to create unique logins.
Choosing a character – input method(s) to streamline the various programs being used at the moment	MAC’s Pinyin Trackpad Handwriting Software	Comes pre-installed with MAC computers

Implementation Plan:

Phase 1 – July, 2010: I do not have access to a classroom at the moment. However, I am taking Chinese writing with 2 other students. I plan to use this small group as a guinea pig to test out my techquest.

Phase 2 – August, 2010: Send this plan to the Elementary Principal and Chinese Computer Teacher at the Chinese International School for consideration and usage in the classroom. While I have not taught there in 10 years, I just saw everyone recently when I was visiting Hong Kong. The Chinese staff of 15 has only changed by 2 teachers since I was there. Everyone else is still there and keen to give some new ideas a try!

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[1] John Bell (Associate Professor, Michigan State University) in “Three Models of Teaching and Learning,” slide lecture from Session 3, course reading.