This study aims at exploring student writing of Chinese characters at their teachers’ dictation in a primary school in Hong Kong. Sample writings of 106 Primary 3 students produced in 12 dictation lessons were collected over a school term. The students wrote a total of 1441 characters. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the student writings. The main results are: First, the students correctly produced a large majority of about 90% of the characters at the dictation. Second, the categories of errors that the students made in writing the characters were diverse. Third, the students made a different combination of errors in writing the semantic and phonetic radicals of the characters. Fourth, a considerable portion of their errors was related to whether they were able to reproduce the specifics of the characters. This study examines the performance of the students after they have been taught to write, hoping to have direct implications to how teachers should teach students to write.
[Copyright © 2015 Journal of Educational Research and Development.]