Sustaining teacher change through participating in a comprehensive approach to teaching Chinese literacy

Abstract

An overview is presented of a three-year project aimed at helping Chinese language teachers in Taiwan refine ways that Chinese, an ideographic language that differs markedly from alphabetic English, is taught in primary schools. Guided by university staff in Taiwan, Hong Kong University and a Taiwanese non-government social enterprise, 20 experienced Taiwanese Chinese language teachers visited Hong Kong, observed literacy lessons, held in-depth discussions with principals and teachers, and engaged in seminars that helped them reflect on ways to modify practice in Taiwan. Back in Taiwan, they tried out techniques witnessed in Hong Kong, shared their experiences with colleagues in and beyond their own school, and evaluated their relevance for language teaching in Taiwan. Experiences were exchanged via practical demonstrations of techniques, video-recordings of lessons, accounts of new ways to teach Chinese, interviews and progress reports on an Internet forum. The outcomes are an example of positive teacher change.

Keywords:

• teacher change
• international collaboration
• Chinese language teaching
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Taiwanese CommonWealth Educational Foundation, and the principals, heads of departments and teachers of participating schools in Hong Kong and Taiwan for their support in this research. We would also like to thank Dr Terry Dolan, Ms Joyce Chan and Mr C.Y. Leung for their input to this paper.