Mycloud: A seamless chinese vocabulary-learning experience mediated by cloud and mobile technologies

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 C hinese L anguage ubiquit OU s learning D ays), 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 fl uency 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 signifi cant improvement in their learning.