A study of Hong Kong young children's early Chinese character writing development

Abstract

Due to a scarcity of research on young children’s Chinese character writing development and learning, there is insufficient empirical evidence to support the practices of helping young children learn to write in the context of Hong Kong. Grounded on the views about the nature of Chinese language and from the perspective of emergent literacy, this study looked into young children’s Chinese character writing forms under free writing conditions and focused attention on categorizing the forms and identifies the developmental patterns. In consideration of the purpose of study to pursue a better understanding about the field of study, this study used qualitative methods to research. The design adopted a strategy of multiple-case study, longitudinal approach and qualitative data collection methods. Data analysis employed an inductive and analytical approach incorporating some quantitative techniques to aggregate results in order to generate findings. The categorization of writing forms gave rise to a classification scheme based on aggregated time-order emergences of writing categories. Synthesis of the findings led to identifying the developmental patterns that was framed by a general progression of two-stage development. Under a pattern of gradual change in the two-stage development, variations of writing forms indicated patterns of variability in relation to the stroke, component, and character units of Chinese character, which encompass a range of linguistic features including stroke-order writing. These findings revealed child’s underlying knowledge in Chinese characters, which will be useful for the educational field. The findings contribute to a tentative theory of early Chinese character writing about children demonstrating a gradual progression in two stages embracing individual differences in forms and time of development in early Chinese character writing during the preschool years. Insights derived from the findings of this study enabled the author to discuss the relation of the unique nature and characteristics of Chinese character to children’s learning to write, and point to inadequacies of some current thinking and practices. The thesis ends with educational implications of orthographic-focused Chinese character writing instruction and research implications of the tentative framework of understanding.