Using phenomenography to investigate the enacted object of learning in teaching activities: the case of teaching Chinese characters in Hong Kong preschools

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese characters
• early childhood education
• phenomenography
• teaching activity
• word learning

Acknowledgements

I am always thankful to Prof. Ference Marton and Dr Ki Wing Wah for inspiring me to study teaching and learning of Chinese characters in classrooms. Special thanks must also go to the course participants of this study, who always asked stimulating questions and made me think hard.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹We must acknowledge that part of the findings of this study have been previously reported in a publication written in Chinese (Lam, 2012). The focus of that publication was on the specific details teachers needed to know in order to teach Chinese characters. For example, what precise difficulties do the children in preschools encounter? In contrast, this paper is written with an international readership in mind and discussion is made at a higher level of abstraction to draw out possible broader theoretical implications to other contexts. For example, how does the research approach used in this study differ from that of other similar studies that have adopted phenomenography to investigate teaching?

²For a thorough review of the studies of various approaches to teaching Chinese characters, see Kwan (2000), Lam (2011), and Tong and Zhang (1999).

³There is indeed a paucity of phenomenographic studies that used methods other than interviews to investigate learners’ ways of seeing the object of learning (e.g., Dall'Alba, 1994; Lam et al., 2004).

⁴The sound of the character here is transcribed using the Romanization of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (2002), where the “f,” “aa,” and “1” denote the onset, rhyme, and tone, respectively.

⁵The four parts in the brackets denote, respectively, the level of the children, the number of children participating in the teaching activity, the nature of the teaching activity, and the district where the preschool was located.

Additional information

Funding

The early stage of this study was in part supported by the ECE Teaching and Research Development Fund (2011/12) of the Hong Kong Institute of Education.