Abstract
Studies on current Chinese-language classroom instructions in Singapore’s primary and secondary schools have shown that most of the curriculum time is spent on the learning of vocabulary, with teacher-centric delivery as the dominant form of pedagogy. This study aims to explore how young students’ learning of Chinese vocabulary can be carried out in a student-centric manner. Ninety-four Primary 3 (9-year-old) students from Nan Chiau Primary School participated in this study. They learned vocabulary through an innovative seamless learning environment known as MyCLOUD (My Chinese Language ubiquitOUs learning Days), mediated by cloud and mobile technologies. The MyCLOUD learning experience encompasses reading of digitised textbook passages, maintaining personalised “Mictionary” (Mobile dictionary), contextualised (authentic) photo-taking and sentence-making with mobile devices, sharing of student artefacts on the MyCLOUD learning platform, and online peer interactions/evaluations. Our analysis indicates that MyCLOUD can help to increase the fluency of vocabulary use among high- and medium-level academic performers (in Chinese language). The model led to greater opportunities for meaningful learning particularly through the learning-application-evaluation trajectory. This had resulted in a positive impact on students’ abilities to appropriately apply their learned vocabularies in greater varieties of contexts. Notwithstanding, the results also show that such a self-directed model had minimal impact on low performers, as they require greater support and more guided practice in sentence-making and peer evaluation in order to achieve significant improvement in their learning.
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Aw, G.P., Wong, LH., Zhang, X., Li, Y., Quek, G.H. (2016). MyCLOUD: A Seamless Chinese Vocabulary-Learning Experience Mediated by Cloud and Mobile Technologies. In: Chai, C., Lim, C., Tan, C. (eds) Future Learning in Primary Schools. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-579-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-579-2_5
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