Abstract:

In opposition to the traditional ‘teacher-oriented’ or ‘curriculum-oriented’ educational contexts, Variation Theory derived from the Phenomenography movement concerning how the subject of learning, the learners, perceive the object phenomenon, how they create meaning from their learning experiences, as well as why some do a much better job of learning than others (Marton & Booth, 1997) . Recently Variation Theory has developed into a structural and methodological pedagogy which focuses on the lesson study for learning experiences and caters for learning differences. A number of scholars and teachers have attempted to apply the theory to different disciplines. However, applications of the theory to Language learning are few. Variation Theory is especially unfamiliar to most in the Chinese teaching discipline. Not only being the first language of most Hong Kong students which operates in their learning, thinking and communicating, Chinese is also rising as a global language of the 21st century, it will be worth investigating if Variation Theory can benefit Chinese Language and Literature education. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate the relevance of Variation Theory to the teaching of the Chinese Language.

The study sets out to examine the possibility of applying Variation Theory to Chinese teaching using “symbolism” as a learning object in an attempt to apply the theory to enhancing students’ learning awareness thus improving learning effectiveness. A Chinese lesson was conducted to teach a class of form one students in a Honk Kong secondary school to grasp the definition and usage of symbolism. Zai Tian’s poetry “Life is a running zebra” was used as a means and the methodologies of “contrast”, “generalization” and “fusion” were applied to let students mobilize their rational thinking and life experiences simultaneously, to such an extent as to perceive the roles and implications that symbolism has in this poetry as well as its general significance in Chinese literary texts.

The study contained assessments on three levels. Other than the pre-test and the post-test, data was also collected from the learning process and the creative writings. Data analysis sorted into categories of description which reflected the learning differences among targeted students. And a conclusion had been drawn according to the different result of the pre-test and post-test. The results of the study suggest that with the application of the theory, the students were more able to be aware of the symbolism used in the literary text which had also helped them to comprehend the themes of the text, learning differences had been narrowed down as well. It opens up space for further exploration on the application of Variation Theory to the literacy aspects of language teaching.

Keywords:

Variation Theory, Chinese teaching, symbolism.