Abstract:

The teaching of traditional Chinese (Wenyan wen) is amongst the most difficult part of the Chinese curriculum in Singapore. Besides students’ learning difficulties in a predominantly English-speaking environment, the lack of learning interest and the shortage of interesting and innovative teaching materials and methods are some of the prevailing challenges.
In view of this, I have designed and constructed a school-based design research, harnessing web-based technology, web 2.0 platforms, and multimedia strategies to teach traditional Chinese to an experiment class, with another class as its control group. Traditional Chinese passages from the Pre-university "Chinese and Literature" curriculum are selected to be the texts for this student-centered learning research.
The findings of this research positively show that students who have gone through traditional Chinese teaching with interactive web-based tools, in comparison to the control group students, tend to recall information better, display higher interest in their learning, and perform significant better in summative assessments, especially when the time gap between learning and assessment increases.

Keywords:

Traditional Chinese, web-based pedagogy, interactive teaching, student-centered learning.