Techquest Project Description Draft #1

This techquest project is a good opportunity to wrestle with an issue I have had for the entirety of my teaching career. I have not been teaching for 10 years, but now that I am looking to return to teaching (and to relocate back to where I did it—Hong Kong), I want to use this opportunity to look for a solution.

My background

Between 1996-2001, I was a technology curriculum coordinator at the Chinese International School in Hong Kong, a bilingual (English – Chinese Mandarin) elementary school for expat and local students. The students had regular homeroom classes in English and with curriculum much like in the US, but they spent close to a third of the day in Chinese.

I taught a third grade homeroom class, but while they were away in Chinese, I was also in charge of finding opportunities to integrate technology into the classroom curriculum. I had a computer teaching background from working as an elementary computer teacher for 2 years at the American School in Taipei, which I was able to leverage in this new role. However, there was a particular new challenge in Hong Kong that I wrestled with – and that the school is still wrestling with today after so many years. The challenge was helping to integrate technology into the Chinese language curriculum.

I think the truly compelling problem of practice (or opportunity) is that Chinese language learning (and thus, its pedagogy) is so rooted in memory-based learning. You hear anecdotally that the Chinese are masters at memorization, that they can copy and perform straightforward tasks exceptionally well. Yet, they lack for some creativity/individual thought and leadership which Western education is more known for imparting. Of course, the society has much to do with it. However, I feel at a gut level that the cause of some of this lays in the particular nature of the Chinese language and its impact on education, and thus society.

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:

•  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..).
• Students “learn” the stroke order through repeated practice drills and various methods of rote memorization (Flash cards, math-like drill software, pneumonic tricks).
• 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]
• Assessment predominantly falls in the camps of weekly written tests and quizzes (a la spelling test dictations)
• Pedagogy seems to vary little across student age and grade level, just the complexity of the characters change.
• 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 Problem of Practice: A Need or an 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:

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

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

·      Or, 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.

Goal of my Techquest

There have been many technological innovations since I was teaching. There are many more ways to input Chinese characters onto a QWERTY keyboard now (the only method back then was a 5-shift structure which gave each symbol its own unique pattern of keystroke. This complexity severely limited student publishing in Chinese. (It was very confusing even to adults). Now, there are so many out there that there is not one consistent one being used. There are better programs (ie: Skritter) that are more customized to one’s lesson plans. Lastly, there were growing pains this past school year due to their transition from PC to MAC. Teachers had just gotten used to PCs when the system changed and are struggling to find MAC solutions. I am going to focus on MAC solutions in my techquest. 

My goal then is to help my old school in its search for effective Chinese language computer instruction, namely focused on:

• Recommending a character – input method(s) to streamline the various programs being used at the moment across both PC and MACs
• Identifying the best program out there that can help support diversity in teaching pedagogy as well as support differing student learning styles.

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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.