Innovative Pedagogy for Teaching Chinese Characters: An Interventional Study to Test Variation Theory

Learning Chinese characters is immensely hard. More rigorous interventional studies that examine the taken-for-granted practice of teachers are lacking. This project is about how learning can be enhanced in the context of teaching characters. The specific purpose of the project is to ascertain more effective way to foster children’s awareness of the function of components in characters, which is to become aware of the functions components of characters can play in signifying the meanings of the characters. This project puts the conjecture of variation theory to the test. Experimental design is adopted with about 150 (K3) children, recruited from three mainstream kindergartens, randomly assigned to three instructional conditions: Induction, Contrast, and Control. In classrooms, the same set of 16 characters are taught in different order in the three conditions. Pre-, immediate post-, and delayed post-tests are administered before, right after, and also three weeks following the teaching. The expected benefit of this interventional study is its intended contribution to the theoretical development of variation theory. Moreover, the results also inform the everyday practice of teaching in schools.

Funding Source: RGC - General Research Fund (GRF)