Development of Chinese Character-Writing Program for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile technology has been adopted in the language education for many years. Mobile teaching has its own advantages and disadvantages and is adopted as a complementary teaching method to traditional teaching in many schools and universities. Mobile app provides a good solution as an assisting teaching tool to increase learning efficiency, engage students in learning, and enhance learning performances. The Chinese character-writing program is a mobile application designed and implemented in ACF Wollongong School, which targets on writing practices and group works. It is designed as an assisting teaching and learning tool for in-class and after-class writing practices in Chinese learning. The project is designed for primary Chinese learners. To make it available to all teachers and parents, the program is implemented by HTML5 and can be easily accessed via web browser through almost any mobile phone or computer without download or installation. Basic functions, such as showing animation of the orders of strokes, marking handwritings, cleaning writing area, and changing characters based on unit lists, are designed to meet the requirement from the Chinese language class teaching. The application was adopted in Chinese class and promoted to the parents with printed notes. The results show that the application had positive influence on students’ learning efficiency, interests in Chinese learning, and engagement in-group works with other students, teachers, and parents in competition. The future design of the application is targeting on handwriting fonts selection and social communication online. Wearable devices could be a good extended area for writing practices too. The future of language learning will be open to all new technologies and devices.