Children are expected to read and write Chinese character before they reach their formal schooling in Hong Kong. The 4 to 6 years old children, *non-Chinese speaking (NCS) and native Chinese speaking children are given similar Chinese writing exercise in the preschools. Nevertheless NCS children are still affected by the differences between their mother language and Chinese. NCS children are more likely to encounter difficulties in writing and reading Chinese. According to the past research reports, the NCS students in Hong Kong who enter a mainstream primary school (Chinese medium instruction), their levels of literacy in Chinese tends to remain at a low level, and they are unable to keep up with local Chinese classmates. The aim of the study is to focus on how NCS children who are 5 to 6 years old learn Chinese characters in a realist classroom setting. The study will be conducted in three Chinese preschools in Hong Kong and investigate the teaching and learning of Chinese characters in five classroom settings using with a phenomenographic approach.

This study set out to use phenomenography as a theoretical framework to investigate teaching in classrooms, focusing on how the same content is enacted differently in different teaching activities. We observed teaching activities intended to teach children to recognize Chinese characters in preschools and collected data about the delivery of the teaching activities. A total of 3 categories of teaching activities were identified from the data, which correspondingly reflected 3 ways of seeing the recognition of characters: (A) recognition as matching items, (B) recognition as imitating behaviors, and (C) recognition as constructing meanings. Our results were useful for fostering the professional learning of teachers in practical ways as well as holding the potential to further advance the methodology of phenomenography.
[Copyright © 2016 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research.]

To read and write Chinese require an ability to recognise more than 1,000 basic graphic units. Very few studies have looked into the perceptual learning process of these graphic units at the initial stage when young children are being introduced to the script. Two tasks were developed to tap children‘s understanding of graphic properties of written Chinese. In the name writing task, we investigated whether preschool children, aged 3-5, (1) would differentiate drawing from writing, (2) used a correspondence between character and syllable in their writing, (3) used multiple units within one character or across characters, and (4) respected some of the supra-segmented properties of written Chinese. In the graphic acceptability task, we examined if 5-9 years old children could make orthographic judgements based on positioning and graphic properties of the stroke-patterns. Our results indicated that preschool children could already demonstrate some knowledge of the properties of graphic units in Chinese by using strokes or made-up stroke-patterns in their name writing. Five and six-year-olds rejected words with illegal graphic features and seven- and eight-years-olds distinguished nonwords from pseudowords based on illegal position of stroke-patterns. We conclude that Chinese children implicitly learn graphic properties of the writing System which arc crucial in the learning process, the possibility to shift perceptual learning of graphic properties of written Chinese from implicit learning to explicit teaching deserves further investigation. The aim of this chapter is to analyze children’s developing knowledge of the graphic units that arc related to speech units in Chinese and the difference between what children arc explicitly taught and what they learn implicitly about these graphic units. The term ‘implicit‘ is used here to indicate that both Chinese children and adults are usually unaware of those formal characteristics of their script that are analyzed in this paper

This study investigated the effectiveness of the integrative perceptual approach (IPA) to enhancing Hong Kong kindergarten children's Chinese character learning. The study applied the IPA to an experimental group of 29 lower form (K2) children. A group of 30 upper form children taught via traditional methods the year before, served as the control group. Quantitative data consisted of pre- and post-test scores, analysed using dependent and independent t-testing. It was found that the pupils in the experimental group had significantly improved their ability between pre- and post-testing in three aspects of Chinese character mastery: shape, sound and meaning recognition. The progress made was significantly superior to that made by control group counterparts. Qualitative data gathered through teacher and parent interviews indicated that the pupils in the experimental group displayed increased awareness of the composition of several components and structures of Chinese characters.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004431003768006]

Two scales of mothers' mediation of their children's writing based on Aram and Levin (2001) were developed and tested in 67 mother-child Hong Kong Chinese dyads in three grade levels - second-year kindergarten, third-year kindergarten, and first grade. With children's ages, grades, and non-verbal IQs, as well as mothers' education levels statistically controlled in a regression equation, the four strategies of the 'Print Mediation' scale, a measure of mother-child joint writing productions, explained a unique 10% of the variance in children's word reading. These four strategies tended to change with age such that higher autonomy was more common among older children and lower autonomy was more prevalent among younger children. In a separate hierarchical regression equation, the 'Literate Mediation' scale, tapping specific writing strategies, explained a unique 8-11% of the variance in children's word reading. A prevalence of copying strategies tended to be negatively associated with reading skill and a prevalence of morphologically based strategies tended to be positively associated with reading skill, even apart from age and grade level. Findings demonstrate some strong developmental trends in the writing process but also suggest that a more analytic approach to Chinese character writing may be helpful for literacy development, even among the youngest children.
[Copyright of Language and Cognitive Processes is the property of Psychology Press. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690960801970615]