Educational Research JournalȠ教育研究學報ȡ , Vol. 29, Nos. 1 & 2, 2014
© Hong Kong Educational Research Association 2014
Different Ways That Preschool Teachers
Taught Children to Write Chinese
Characters in Hong Kong Classrooms
Ho-cheong Lam
The Hong Kong Institute of Education, China
This study aimed to explore how preschool teachers teach children to
write Chinese characters. The method used in this study was inspired by
phenomenography. Specifically, the author videotaped and analyzed the
ways that three preschool teachers taught their children to write the same
set of eleven Chinese characters. The analysis focused on how the teachers
enacted the same object of learning (i.e., the writing of the 11 characters)
differently in the classrooms. Pre- and post-tests were administered to
determine how well the children learned to write the characters after the
teaching of their teachers. Seven teaching strategies that the three teachers
used to teach their children to write the characters were identified.
Interestingly, an inconsistency was found among the three teachers’
understandings of the correct ways to write the characters. This study
expands the understanding about possible ways for teaching preschool
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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ho-cheong Lam,
Department of Early Childhood Education, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong
Kong, China. E-mail: hclam@ied.edu.hk