Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education
Date of this Version
2017
Citation
Olmanson, J., & Liu, X. (2017). The Challenge of Chinese Character Acquisition: Leveraging Multimodality in Overcoming a Centuries-Old Problem. Emerging Learning Design Journal, 4(1), 1–9.
Abstract
For learners unfamiliar with character-based or logosyllabic writing systems, the process of developing literacy in written Chinese poses significantly more obstacles than learning to read and write in a second language like Portuguese or Cherokee. In this article we describe the linguistic nature of Chinese characters; we outline traditional and new media approaches to Chinese character acquisition; we unpack how multimodal technologies combined with computational linguistics might be used to provide new types of support for Chinese character learning; and we offer a design that incorporates several of these concepts into a digital writing support tool that could work as a scaffold to enable Chinese language students to leverage their Chinese listening and speaking skills as well as their visual literacies in support of producing and learning Chinese characters.
Included in
Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Instructional Media Design Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, Online and Distance Education Commons, Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons
Comments
This article is being published as a proceeding of the 2015 Emerging Learning Design Conference (ELDc 2015).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.