Master of Arts (Instructional Design & Technology)

This paper discusses the developmental process of the national project 'Chinese Language Item Bank' for primary schools, secondary schools and junior colleges from 1999 to 2000. The project was initiated by IT Training Branch of Education Technology Division, Ministry of Education of Singapore. This project involved numerous Schools Working Committees and received strong support from our school Chinese Language teachers. Our working partners were Heads of Department (Mother Tongue) and Chinese Language teachers from primary schools, secondary schools, junior colleges and centralized institutes. This project aims to develop a Chinese Language Item Bank to help facilitate the process of setting Chinese Language test papers and to provide quality question items for assessment purposes. In this project, ITT Working Committee and Schools Working committees adopted the Action Research approach because we believed we were dealing with a real school problem and the Chinese Language teachers were viewed as our research partners.

We worked closely with our Chinese Language teachers to build and evaluate this Item Bank so that they would be in a position to make enhancement to the Chinese Language Item Bank in future. From our findings, we were happy to know that the Chinese Language Item Bank helped to lighten the workload of setting a test paper of the Chinese Language teachers. We started with stand-alone Chinese Language Item Bank with the intention of moving towards an Online Chinese Language Item Bank for our schools.

The creation of the Chinese Language (CL) Portal was based on the needs of the students so as to arouse their interest in CL learning as well as expose the new learning platform. As there was no suitable websites that could cater to the school English-speaking students, the Chinese department developed the CL Portal with the objectives to encourage academic interactions between teachers and students and among students.

Three prototypes were designed based on pedagogical, social and technological aspects. They were created, tested and evaluated using the action research approach. Through the development of the CL Portal, the students’ perceptions on the portal’s contents, tools and interface were investigated. Data was collected through teachers’ observations of students’ work, a survey and interviews.

Results showed that the CL Portal’s contents were able to cater to students with different learning abilities. Students were satisfied with the features available in the portal which supported interactive learning. They also commented that the navigations were easy and generally the portal was user-friendly.

The creation of the CL Portal was beneficial to both teachers and students. The portal has greater potential in assisting teaching and learning. With more usage of the portal, students will exhibit more confidence in learning through this platform. Eventually, the students will also be able to use written Chinese better.

The Justice Bao CD ROM is an educational role-playing game. It aims to motivate students in the learning of the Chinese Language. It is divided into two parts, the court proceedings and the investigation process. The court proceedings section aims to utilise multimedia interaction and provision of a dictionary tool to enhance the comprehension ability of students. The investigation process utilizes the role-playing game to provide a fun filled way to do drill and practice to improve the students' language ability. The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the multimedia interaction and dictionary tool in enhancing the comprehension ability of students and make recommendations accordingly.

In many classrooms today, teacher-centered approach is still dominant in the instruction of writing in Chinese Language with insufficient emphasis given to foster pupils' self-regulatory ability in their composing process. This study adopted the instructional strategy of collaborative writing with reference to two models of cognitive processes in Composing (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Flower et al., 1986) and in Revision (Flower et al., 1986) which comprises the Planning stage and Reviewing stage. The Planning stage was scaffolded with an event map with the 5W1H thinking strategy incorporated. The Reviewing stage was conducted in two phases and pupils used scaffold sentence openings to carry out discussions. The study focused on the reviewing stage. 26 Primary six pupils in an all boys school were involved in this study. They were divided into two groups : the experimental group conducted discussion via electronic discussion forum, whereas comparison group carried out peer review using the pen and paper method. The aim of the study is to examine the difference in pupils' intentions that result in meaning-changing revisions between the experimental group via the Knowledge Community and the comparison group using pen and paper method. The result of this study showed that pupils in the experimental group were able to contribute more evaluative responses due to the enforced structure of scaffold sentence openings in the Knowledge Community and pupils from both groups were also able to make meaning-changing revisions by means of addition. Although most of the responses were able to influence the pupils to make meaning-changing revisions, pupils' individual differences contributed some discrepancies in conceptualising the intentions of the reviewers and their own revisions.

In the past twenty years, teaching of picture composition has been part of the syllabus for Mother Tongue in the primary school education. Under such school curriculum for Mother Tongue, pupils from Primary Three to Primary Four are required to complete ten picture compositions per year. A series of four black and white line-drawn pictures with some helping vocabulary items are given to the pupils and they are required to complete the composition writing task with at least eighty words with a given time frame of 40 minutes.

For the Primary Five and Primary Six pupils, a series of six black and white line-drawn pictures with some helping vocabulary items are given. Then, they are required to complete the composition writing task with at least a hundred words. The curriculum quota for them is also to complete ten compositions including picture compositions and situational essays. The standard time frame to complete the picture composition assignment is 50 minutes.

This paper examines the possibility of integrating colour photographs into teaching Chinese picture composition from Primary Three to Primary Six to improve pupils' writing skills. This study followed the action research approach. Two schools involving 194 pupils from Primary Three, Primary Four and Primary Six Chinese Language teachers took part in the study.

The results indicated that majority of the pupils were in favour of using colour photographs in picture composition writing. Also, the pupils had shown improvement in writing picture compositions. Furthermore, using colour photographs to conduct picture composition lessons has the potential to reduce teachers' workload of preparing picture composition lessons when more colour photographs are available in the future.