Enhancing the traditional with the modern: A web-based and multimedia pedagogical design in the instruction of traditional Chinese

The teaching of traditional Chinese (Wenyan wen) is amongst the most difficult part of the Chinese curriculum in Singapore. Besides students’ learning difficulties in a predominantly English-speaking environment, the lack of learning interest and the shortage of interesting and innovative teaching materials and methods are some of the prevailing challenges. In view of this, I have designed and constructed a school-based design research, harnessing web-based technology, web 2.0 platforms, and multimedia strategies to teach traditional Chinese to an experiment class, with another class as its control group. Traditional Chinese passages from the Pre-university "Chinese and Literature" curriculum are selected to be the texts for this student-centered learning research. The findings of this research positively show that students who have gone through traditional Chinese teaching with interactive web-based tools, in comparison to the control group students, tend to recall information better, display higher interest in their learning, and perform significantly better in summative assessments, especially when the time gap between learning and assessment increases.

在新加坡，教导文言文是华文课程最困难的一部分。除了学生在一个普遍使用英语环境里会遇到的困难，现有的挑战也包括学生缺乏兴趣，缺少有趣和创新的教研材料和方法。有鉴于此，我设立了一个校本设计调查，把学生分为实验组和对照组。在试验组学生身上我利用互联网的技术，web 2.0平台和多媒体策略来教导文言文。这项以学生为主体的研究选择的篇章是大学先修班的 “华文与文学” 课程。这调查结果确实显现了通过互动网络工具来学习文言文的学生，信息提取能力更强。他们的学习兴趣比较高，测试表现比较好。尤其是当学习和测试相隔一段时间后，试验组学生的表现更为出色。