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Chinese traditional calligraphy is an important part of Chinese culture, with rich cultural value, historical value, artistic value and educational value. Traditional calligraphy art has shown new characteristics in the current era. This research objectives are: 1) to study the historical development and cultural value of Chinese calligraphy; 2) to analyze the current situation and issues of Chinese calligraphy; 3) to identify the way in which inheritance and literacy of Chinese calligraphy art can be protected. This research adopts qualitative methods, collecting field data through literature document, surveys, interviews, observations, and group discussions. Our results summarize the multiple eras through which the historical development of Chinese calligraphy took place. Our study focused on the content and artistic styles of Chinese calligraphy, categorizing its development into four periods; namely (i) Primitive Society to 2070 BC, which is characterized by pictographic writing and primitive symbols, (ii) 2070 BC to 221 BC, the period of formation of written characters and invention of the writing brush and ink, (iii) 221 BC to 589 AD, characterized by the standardization of Xiaozhuan and the invention of papermaking, and (iv) 589 AD to 1905 AD characterized by development and refinement of the five script styles influenced by the imperial examination system. Our results also depict the current situation and problems of Chinese calligraphy and the problems it faces. Finally, the results also show the multiple ways in which Chinese calligraphy could be preserved. As an excellent cultural heritage, traditional Chinese calligraphy art will shine with new light in modern society.

Development dyslexia (DD) is a common language disorder, that significantly affects children. Despite having ordinary intelligence, dyslexic people struggle with reading, writing, and comprehension in their native tongue. It is still unclear whether dyslexic kids have difficulties with visuo-spatial working memory. Using meta-analysis, this gap was filled. Applying a Boolean search on Web of Science was necessary to find the pertinent papers. Thirteen studies were analyzed. The average, standard deviation, and sample size for each task were extracted. There were large effect sizes between children with DD and their age-matched peers in terms of their visuo-spatial working memory. The findings imply that visuo-spatial working memory deficiencies in dyslexic children indicate that dyslexia might exhibit domain-general characteristics. We discovered during our research that the type of language used and the testing procedure could have an impact on the test outcomes. Therefore, future research should focus on the type of tasks or language.

Second language (L2) research on input manipulation has focused mainly on increasing the salience of target structures, but presentation formats of L2 input can be another important aspect for manipulation. This study compared the horizontal, vertical, and adjacent formats for presenting the characters, pinyin, and English meaning of L2 Chinese vocabulary, by recruiting 69 English native speakers to study 30 Chinese words in these formats. Learning outcomes were indexed with vocabulary gain scores from pretest to posttest. Learner perceptions of the learning process were recorded with ratings and reasons for preference among these formats. The quantitative results showed the adjacent format generally led to higher gain scores than the other two formats and that L2 proficiency also contributed positively. To learners, the adjacent format was the least preferred, but preference ratings were not associated with gain scores. The qualitative findings suggested format familiarity and layout features as main factors of learner preference.

Knowledge of symbols, which can be influenced by school ethos, informs identity construction in primary school children. This study aimed to explore Gaelscoil (Irish-medium) and English-medium primary school children's familiarity with Irish and European symbols. Thirty 9-12-year-old children in Ireland participated in this study; 15 from two Irish-medium and 15 from an English-medium primary school. A draw-and-tell data collection design was used and qualitative data was analysed using the constant comparative method. Results indicate children from both school types shared a number of Irish symbols, namely Irish emblems, Irish mythology, sports and material aspects of culture. Irish-medium primary school children had two further Irish symbol categories, the past as a symbol and physical characteristics of Ireland. European symbols shared across children from both school types included signifiers of the European Union (EU), monetary symbols and European countries. The Irish-medium primary school children had two further categories, Europe through an Irish lens and European cuisine, while the English-medium children had one further category, sport. The results suggest that by middle childhood, children in both school types have knowledge about a number of symbols associated with both national and European identities. Implications for future research are discussed.

Testing can potentiate new learning, which is often called the "forward testing effect." One potential explanation for this benefit is that testing might enable participants to use more effective learning strategies subsequently. We investigated this possibility by asking participants to report their encoding strategies in a multi-list foreign language learning paradigm with four preregistered experiments and one non-preregistered pilot experiment. In Experiments 1-3, participants learned three lists of Chinese-English pairs; one group took a test after every list (i.e., test condition) and the other group took a test only for the criterial List 3 (i.e., restudy condition). In addition, participants completed a transfer test and a study strategy survey. Although we found a forward testing effect in all experiments, participants in the test and restudy conditions did not report differences in strategies. In Experiments 4 and 5, we used a within-subject design so that we could correlate changes in strategy use with the magnitude of the forward testing effect on an individual level. Interestingly, individual differences in strategy change were moderately associated with the magnitude of the forward testing effect, but even here, strategy change did not mediate the effect of testing on performance. Overall, our data showed that, at least for foreign language learning of Chinese characters, interim testing did not enhance new learning by altering participants' subsequent encoding strategies. Moreover, our data showed that interim testing did not promote the transfer of Chinese language learning to novel characters.

The present study aimed to investigate whether and how Chinese single character reading and 2-character word reading can reflect somewhat different processes. Tasks of Chinese rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and nonverbal intelligence tasks, were administered to 283 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners ("Mean age" = 66.08 months, SD = 5.15), who were followed up one year later at grade one. Results demonstrated that, concurrently, morphological awareness and RAN explained unique variance in Chinese word reading at kindergarten when character reading was statistically controlled; character reading had no unique cognitive-linguistic correlates when word reading was statistically controlled. Longitudinally, word reading at grade one was predicted by character reading at kindergarten. In contrast, character reading at grade one could not be predicted by word reading at kindergarten. These findings suggest that Chinese children's processing of 2-character words and single characters should be treated differently in Chinese reading acquisition.

Plagiarism has been among the top forms of academic misconduct. Detective, reactive and proactive measures are taken to mitigate plagiarism in scholarly works. Text-matching tools play a significant role in the detection of plagiarism. Many studies have tested the performance of text-matching tools in detecting plagiarism from various perspectives. However, no study addressed the performance of such tools in ideographic languages, particularly Japanese. Considering the sharp increase in the number of academic Japanese text and plagiarism incidents in the Japanese context, it is essential to explore to what extent text-matching tools catch similarities in Japanese texts and respond to the needs of Japanese users. Within this scope, this study set out to explore the coverage and usability performance of text-matching tools in the Japanese language. We tested the coverage performance of 10 text-matching tools with five types of intentionally plagiarized documents. Also, we tested the usability performance via a feature checklist. The testing results suggested that the tools generally give a relatively higher performance on the usability side rather than the coverage aspect. Most tools have minimal coverage performance in the Japanese language. In the end, we provided takeaways for vendors, policymakers and educators.

Most Chinese characters comprise radicals that are embedded in a specific structure (e.g., left-right structure like [Chinese characters omitted], or top-bottom structure like [Chinese characters omitted]). We investigated the representations of word-form units (i.e., radicals) in planning Chinese handwritten production. Adopting the picture-word interference paradigm (Experiment 1, N = 29), we manipulated picture names and their corresponding distractors to share one radical. Radicals embedded in the same character structure as the target significantly shortened the participants' writing latency, no matter whether the radicals appeared at the same or a different position in the distractor. This finding suggests that radicals appearing at different positions in characters with the same structure may share the same representations in planning Chinese written word production. On the other hand, when the shared radical appeared in the distractor that possessed a different structure than the target, a non-significant facilitation trend was observed. Experiment 2 adopted the form-preparation paradigm and obtained a similar non-significant trend of facilitation, in a larger sample (N = 53). Radicals embedded in different character structures might be represented as distinct units among (a proportion of) Chinese writers, suggesting the important role of character structure in planning Chinese handwritten production. The potential influence of language-specific features on the representations of word-form units should be taken into account when building word production models. Practical implications for literacy instruction are also discussed.

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects primary school students, which is difficult to tackle through traditional school learning due to limited resources. To this end, large-scale digital learning presents new opportunities to address the need for inclusive education. A unique challenge for students with dyslexia in Hong Kong is learning Chinese characters. In this article, we investigate whether students with dyslexia can learn the writing of Chinese characters independently in an informal learning environment. For that purpose, we developed a mobile application for learning to write Chinese characters with three different writing conditions. First, students learn new Chinese characters in Condition 1: Grid+Contour+Instruction. Then, students strengthen their memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 2: Grid+Contour. Finally, students retrieve the memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 3: Grid Only. Students with dyslexia demonstrated a significant improvement after practicing with the three-condition design. For example, they wrote much slower than students without dyslexia before the study but caught up over time. This study contributes an approach to facilitate the self-paced learning of students with dyslexia at scale.

This study aims to compare auditory temporal processing and phonological processing across locations and age levels and to test the direct and indirect effects of auditory temporal and phonological processing on proficiency in Chinese character reading. We recruited 108 typically developing children -- 25 and 24 kindergarteners from Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively, and 34 and 25 primary school students from Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively. Our findings showed that, before learning PCS, the languages' phonological complexity did not affect the importance of ATP in Chinese reading. Also, we found the use of PCS could lead to a direct effect from students' ATP to Chinese character reading as well as through phonological awareness. Our findings indicated that ways of learning to read influence children's patterns of cognitive and linguistic abilities, which should be considered in teaching designs for reading. [Translation from English by Mercè Rius.]

Background: Visual attention span (VAS) refers to the number of visual elements processed simultaneously in a multielement array. Yet, there are mixed findings regarding VAS deficit in developmental dyslexia (DD) across different tasks, stimuli, languages, control groups, and ages. Aim: The present meta-analysis aimed to investigate VAS deficit in DD and factors moderating VAS deficit in DD. Methods: A meta-analysis based on 32 articles, 54 independent studies, and 4211 subjects was conducted. Effect sizes for each study were calculated and a random-effect model was selected. Task and stimulus types in the VAS task, writing system, orthographic depth, control group type, and age were included as possible moderators. Results: 1) VAS in dyslexic individuals was significantly worse than typically developing individuals; 2) Task-stimulus type (report-verbal/n-back-verbal/n-back-nonverbal), writing system (alphabetic vs. Chinese), and control group type (age matched vs. reading matched) significantly moderated VAS deficit in DD. VAS deficit was more severe in report task with verbal stimuli than in n-back task with verbal and nonverbal stimuli. VAS deficit was more severe in alphabetic language than in Chinese. VAS deficit was more severe when compared with age-matched controls than compared with reading-matched controls. Conclusion: VAS deficit is a possible etiology for DD and moderated by task-stimulus type, writing system, and control group type. These findings have important implications for the understanding of DD.

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and visual discrimination at the end of kindergarten (T1). Their word reading fluency in Hiragana was assessed at T1 and reassessed in Grade 1 (T2), and their reading accuracy in Kanji was assessed at T2. Results of path analysis showed that phonological awareness, RAN, phonological memory, and visual discrimination were associated with Hiragana word reading fluency at T1, whereas morphological awareness uniquely predicted Hiragana word reading fluency at T2. Additionally, RAN, morphological awareness, vocabulary, and visual discrimination, but not Hiragana reading accuracy, uniquely predicted Kanji reading at T2. The findings provided evidence that RAN, morphological awareness, and visual discrimination play important roles in early reading development across the two contrastive scripts.

The current study investigated perceptual simulation and its relationship with literacy ability in Chinese children. Ninety-three third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children completed a sentence-picture verification task for perceptual simulation. In this task, a sentence mentioning an object was presented first, followed by a picture involving the object. The picture was either a perceptual match with the preceding sentence or a mismatch. The participants were asked to judge whether the object in the picture was mentioned in the preceding sentence. Literacy ability was measured by a Chinese character reading task. Model analysis revealed a significant mismatch effect: the children gave faster correct responses to the perceptually matched pictures than to the mismatched ones. Furthermore, the children with lower literacy abilities displayed larger mismatch effects than those with higher literacy abilities. The results suggest that children with lower literacy abilities may rely more heavily on reactivated perceptual representations in language comprehension.

Copying characters presented previously (delayed copying) is an important skill in Chinese literacy acquisition. The relations of delayed copying and a set of literacy-related skills (including vocabulary knowledge, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness), visual-orthographic judgment, motor coordination, pure copying of foreign scripts, and delayed copying to Chinese spelling were examined among 294 typically developing Hong Kong kindergarteners. With all other variables statistically controlled, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, motor coordination, and delayed copying all uniquely explained Chinese spelling. To further investigate how delayed copying interacts with other skills, path analyses were conducted. The final model showed that vocabulary knowledge, visual-orthographic judgment, and pure copying had indirect effects on spelling through delayed copying. These findings partly support spelling models developed in alphabetic writing systems, but also reflect the uniqueness of Chinese. In addition, results suggest that delayed copying is a unique window into how children learn to write words in Chinese. The potentially critical role of delayed copying in Chinese spelling makes it a potentially good clinical indicator of early spelling proficiency and spelling difficulties.

To explore the roles of character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic awareness in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students' reading fluency, 52 Chinese DHH students (mean age = 13.29 years) in elementary school participated in the present study. The results showed that character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic awareness significantly predicted DHH students' reading fluency after age and nonverbal reasoning ability were controlled for. Specifically, character recognition and syntactic awareness uniquely and significantly accounted for the variance in reading fluency beyond the effect of the other two predictors in children in lower grades (grades 1--3), whereas the unique effects of expressive vocabulary and syntactic awareness were significant in children in higher grades (grades 4-6). These findings suggested that these three factors are important to Chinese DHH students' reading fluency, but that their relative contributions vary across different stages in elementary school.

Over the past decades, subjects concerned with the Chinese character "zhi [Chinese character omitted]", i.e. grammatical structure, in ancient Chinese language, have been widely explored. This paper conducts a research from a new dimension: the Cardiff Grammar, an integral part of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which is famous for its "problem-oriented theory". In order to shed light on the semantics and syntactic functions of "zhi [Chinese character omitted]" in the Chinese nominal group, this study examines five distinctive nominal groups involving "zhi [Chinese character omitted]" with elaborate tree diagrams which are presented in each of the following sections. Through the contrastive study, we find that the Chinese character "zhi [Chinese character omitted]" has some various functions in different situations: as genitive element (g), as modifier trigger (mtr), as selector (v), as qualifier introducer (qint) and as deictic determiner (dd).

Spelling difficulties is referred to as dictation difficulties in China. The visual-auditory binding deficit hypothesis suggested that Chinese dictation difficulties can be correlated with deficits in binding visual and auditory information. However, how Chinese characters are mentally represented in children with dictation difficulties remained unexplored. In this study, 20 children with dictation difficulties and 18 chronically age-matched controls completed dictation tasks using grapheme cues, syllable cues, and grapheme-syllable cues. Dictation accuracy was recorded. Findings showed that under the grapheme cue condition, dictation accuracy between the two groups did not differ significantly; under the grapheme-syllable and the syllable condition, dictation accuracy in children with dictation difficulties was significantly lower compared to controls. These findings supported that the graphemic and phonological representations of Chinese characters might loosely associated in the mental lexicon of children with dictation difficulties. Intervention strategies should take into account improving their ability to associate graphemes and syllables of Chinese characters.

Augmented Reality (AR) has been applied to education in a variety of subjects, but in comparison to AR in STEM education, research on integrating pedagogical designs with AR in language learning is less mature. This study presents an AR-supported Chinese character learning game designed for young learners and investigates its effects on learners' cognitive engagement in classroom learning. A total of 53 grade 2 students and two teachers from a Singapore government primary school participated in the study. The findings indicate an obvious improvement of students' levels of cognitive engagement in the AR-supported activities. Furthermore, compared with acquiring expert-created content knowledge, students are more continuously engaged in the learning activities designed for enabling self-generated contexts. Suggestions for future system design and pedagogical strategies of leveraging AR to engage young learners in language learning are proposed from this study. The study also provides some insight into how to investigate cognitive outcomes of AR-enabled learning design through analysing learning process.

The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on the Chinese character recognition task, the block design task, the digit span task, the visuospatial sketchpad task, the continuous performance task (CPT), the flanker task, and the choice reaction time task. The results showed that visual skills and working memory accounted for 15% of the unique variance in character reading, whereas other general cognitive skills, including decision speed, inhibitory control and attention, did not significantly explain the variance in character reading when visual skills and working memory were considered. Specifically, verbal working memory, rather than visuospatial working memory, explained the unique variance in children's learning of character reading. These findings highlighted that visual skills and verbal working memory were among the most important precursors of reading in children at the beginning stage of learning Chinese characters.

This study examined the extent to which Chinese children with dyslexia show temporal processing deficits in addition to deficits in various forms of attention. In total, 104 Chinese children in primary school (Grades 3-6) were recruited in Taiwan. Half of the children were identified as having dyslexia, and the other half were typically developing children who were matched by gender, IQ, and age with the children with dyslexia. Our results indicated that Chinese children with dyslexia performed significantly worse on tasks of temporal processing, selective attention, and switching attention. Furthermore, both visual and auditory temporal processing, in addition to various attention types, could be significant distinguishing predictors between the two groups. Moreover, we found that visual temporal processing, but not auditory temporal processing, significantly contributed to Chinese character reading. This study was among the first to confirm the unique role of visual temporal processing in Chinese character reading.

The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants included 287 Hong Kong Chinese children (167 third graders, 84 girls, "mean age" = 8.73, SD = 0.49, and 120 fourth graders, 45 girls, "mean age" = 9.93, SD = 0.51). Using structural equation modelling, we found a significant direct effect of visual search on reading comprehension, after age, non-verbal IQ, and Chinese character reading were included in the model. The relationship between visual search and reading comprehension was also found to be mediated by Chinese character reading. When word detection was entered to the model, the relationship between visual search and reading comprehension was fully mediated by both word detection and Chinese character reading. When reading comprehension measured 1 year ago was further controlled, only the mediation of word detection turned out to be significant. The results highlight the importance of visual search in passage reading in Chinese and the mediating role of word detection in understanding this relationship.

This paper presents an augmented reality-based Chinese character composition game (ARC) that employs augmented papers to engage lower primary school students in collaborative Chinese character learning. A design research approach was used to gain a holistic view of designing, enacting, and evaluating the ARC. The participants included four teachers and five classes of students from two primary schools. The school-based research findings suggested that: (1) the ARC was an effective system for improving beginning learners' orthographic knowledge of Chinese characters, particularly for those students with low Chinese language proficiency; (2) the tangible paper interface engaged students in group work and increased the game playfulness; and (3) students' language proficiency had a significant effect on their perceptions of ease of use and usefulness of the augmented paper game. This paper not only substantiated the potential of the augmented paper as a carrier of educational content, but also instantiated how to implement it to promote social and cognitive supports for interaction and collaboration.

Recent research has demonstrated that abstract orthographic representations such as morphemes, syllables, and graphemes, influence handwritten production in languages with alphabetic scripts. The orthographic representations involved in the written production of non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese are less well understood. Chinese words consist of one or more characters which typically contain embedded radicals, with radicals themselves composed of strokes. A logographemic representational level, in between radical and strokes, has also been postulated. Here we report four experiments using a form preparation task ("implicit priming") to test for the presence of radical and logographemic priming effects in writers of simplified Chinese characters. We found strong evidence for radical-based effects, but only weak evidence for logographemic priming effects, which contrasts with recent positive logographemic priming effects reported by Chen and Cherng (2013) for writers of traditional characters. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed in terms of potential differences between simplified and traditional scripts, as well as other procedural differences.

Computer-based writing is already a norm to a large extent in social communication for any major language around the world. From this perspective, it would be pedagogically sound for students to master the Chinese input system as early as possible. This poses some challenges to students in Singapore, most of which are learning Chinese as a second language, as inputting the non-alphabetic Chinese characters is not as direct as keyboard-based input. In this regard, an exploratory study that involved 419 students from three secondary schools was conducted. The aims of the study were three-folded, (1) To investigate if there is any differences between their performances in computer- and paper-based writing; (2) To determine the relationships between their Chinese input skills and their motivation in learning Chinese and using computers for Chinese assignments; (3) To recommend a cut-off level of pinyin input skill that students need to possess. The target students were first surveyed and then sat in two essay writing tests in the two different mediums. The collected data were quantitatively analyzed. The findings of this study will help to inform various strategies necessary to enhance students' ability to carry out computer-based writing, and provide additional ground for the adoption of Chinese input system in formal curriculum and assessments. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper reports an exploratory study on Singapore secondary and primary school students' perceptions and behaviors on using a variety of Chinese input methods for Chinese composition writing. Significant behavioral patterns were uncovered and mapped into a cognitive process, which are potentially critical to the training of students in inputting Chinese via computers. Due to the cognitive complexity of Chinese computer input, there seemed to be a misalignment between the perceived effectiveness of these input methods and their actual benefits. They will only be effective if the composition writers possess appropriate language abilities and technical skills. In addition, as secondary school composition writers had higher level linguistic and technical skills, for example, the ability to guess the correct pinyin (a Romanized phonetic scheme that is required for Chinese text input) based on experience, they were more likely to view the input system favorably than primary school students. This has implications in how to prepare primary school students for information and technology mediated composition writing in Singapore. Pinyin and technical skills should be introduced as early as possible for them to appreciate the benefits of computer-mediated Chinese text input and subsequently, composition writing. (Contains 1 figure, 3 tables, and 2 footnotes.)

The present study examined the equivalency of conventional and web-based tests in reading Chinese. Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), reading accuracy, and reading fluency tests were administered to 93 grade 6 children in Taiwan with both test versions (paper-pencil and web-based). The results suggest that conventional and web-based versions were equally predictive of Chinese reading measures. However, the equivalency of the two testing mediums was found with RAN only. (Contains 6 tables and 6 figures.)

As a result of rapid developments in information and communication technology (ICT), dramatic changes are taking place in approaches to teaching and learning in university and school classrooms. These changes offer new opportunities to explore entirely new methods of instruction in teacher education. ICT provides alternatives to conventional audiovisual media (films, videos and TV programs) and opens up an entirely new framework for knowledge distribution among teaching professionals. However, introducing new information technologies into schools will not automatically confer benefits on teachers and students. In spite of the promise made available by technology, many teachers remain conservative, preferring to hold fast to their familiar teaching practices, and reluctant to explore the possibilities that technology creates for transforming teaching and learning. Of course, the introduction of ICT into schools does not automatically produce benefits to students. It often amounts simply to the installation of equipment that is seldom used. The reasons for this reluctance to change can be traced to the individualistic and isolated nature of the teaching profession and the low communication rate among colleagues in the workplace. In this paper, the author describes, in two parts, an innovative approach to distance learning for teacher education conducted with second year students in the B.Ed. program at Bukkyo University in Kyoto, Japan. The first part concerns the development of symbols and a pictorial presentation system for a universal communication required for distance learning. The second, concerns the application of the system to convert instruction from a traditional teaching style to a new one applicable to distance learning, and to examine its feasibility. (Contains 4 figures.)

The pedagogical and theoretical questions addressed in this study relate to the extent to which native Japanese readers with little or no knowledge of Chinese characters recognize Chinese characters that are viewed as abbreviations of the kanji they already know. Three graphic similarity functions (i.e., an orthographically acceptable similarity, a physical similarity, and an extended physical similarity function) were formulated to predict the Japanese learners' target kanji production. Results showed that the learners' performance was poor, with only approximately 30% correct, and that the extended physical similarity function incorporating character frequency and graphic neighbors more accurately accounted for the target production than other functions. Some pedagogical implications and issues for further research are briefly discussed.

Type design is the process of re-organizing visual elements and their corresponding meanings into a new organic entity, particularly for the highly logographic Chinese characters whose intrinsic features are retained even after re-organization. Due to this advantage, designers believe that such a re-organization process will not affect Chinese character recognition. However, not having an effect on recognition is not the same as not affecting the viewing process, especially when the character is so highly deconstructed that, along with the viewing process, the original intention of the design and its efficacy are both indirectly affected. Therefore, besides capturing the changes of character features, a good type designer should understand how characters are viewed. Past studies have found that character structure will affect character recognition, particularly for enclosed and non-enclosed characters whose differences are significant, although the interpretation of such differences remains open for discussion. This study explored the viewing process of Chinese characters with eye-tracking methods and calculated the concentration and saccadic amplitude of fixation in the viewing process in terms of the descriptive approach in a geographic information system, so as to investigate the differences among types of character modules with the spatial dispersion index. This study found that the overall vision when viewing enclosed structures is more concentrated than non-enclosed structures.

Although copying and name writing skills are regarded as the indicators of handwriting development in alphabetic writing systems, there is limited information on logographs such as Chinese. Chinese characters are not only simply a combination of strokes as letters in English, but also place a great demand on visuospatial ability to maintain good proportion and alignment of these interwoven strokes. This study investigated the developmental characteristics of visuo-orthographic copying on the composition of Chinese characters, namely strokes, radicals and characters, and Chinese name writing among kindergarten children in Hong Kong. A group of 141 children from the first to third year of kindergarten education (K1 to K3) were recruited. They were asked to complete two tasks: (1) visuo-orthographic copying of common Chinese strokes, radicals, and characters; and (2) write down their Chinese name from memory. Overall, the abilities of Chinese name writing were moderately to strongly related with the abilities in copying the composition of Chinese characters. It also showed that copying radicals significantly predicted Chinese name writing ability. The results suggested that copying radicals provided a foundation so that a good spatial organization of these components within a square configuration could be achieved in the name writing task. It recommended that copying of strokes, radicals, and characters should be addressed as a whole for the Chinese handwriting development. In addition, Chinese name writing skills should also be assessed to provide a window on the understanding of the transition of copying skills into Chinese handwriting.

This paper presents the concept of symbolic resources for apprehending sense-making in learning and instruction. It first reminds the centrality of sense-making in learning and instruction from a sociocultural perspective, and proposes a pragmatist approach to examine what sorts of knowledge people use when they face situations that matter. The paper then presents two series of studies of symbolic resources. The first studies, led in informal situations, allow to define the concept of symbolic resources and a model of its uses. The second series is focused on school situations, and examines how school knowledge can be used as symbolic resources, and also, how symbolic resources can support learning in educational settings. This leads into a discussion on the role of institutional and social dynamics in the relations between learning in and out of school, at the heart of sense-making, as well as on the central role of imagination in learning and development. The paper ends by underlying the centrality of sense-making in learning and development, and the need to complement nomothetic studies with a more idiographic understanding of the complex dynamics involved.

A study investigated how Chinese characters (hanzi) were taught and learned in a first-year Chinese language class in an American university. Traditionally the teaching of hanzi in higher education has taken one of four approaches: radical; high-frequency-hanzi; phonetic; and non-teaching. The four approaches are analyzed from the second language acquisition perspective, focusing on first-to-second-language transfer and orthographic depth effects in comparing native Chinese learners and second language learners of Chinese. Subjects were 15 university students. Data were collected using participant observation, interviews, and a survey. Research questions included: (1) the approach/belief the teacher follows, and the relationship between that approach and teaching techniques; and (2) the learning strategies adopted by students. Results and their pedagogical implications are reported. The student background questionnaire, student strategy-use questionnaire, teacher questionnaire, and a summary of results are appended. Contains 88 references. (MSE)