Sunday Onsite Presentation Session 3

Education/Pedagogy

Session Chair: Anelyn Montes

13:40-14:05

70112 | Culture Difference Instruction in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Yanrong Qi, University of Oklahoma, United States

Learning is seen as socialization, or as a situated process of participation in particular communities of practice learning is "a process of becoming or avoiding becoming a certain person, rather than a simple accumulation of skills and knowledge" (Pavlenko, 2001). Learning a foreign language needs to understand the culture that related to the language. The role of background knowledge in language comprehension is formalized as schema theory (Rumelhart, 1980). The second or foreign language learners’ previously acquired background knowledge includes the grapho-phonic, syntactic, and semantic types. The learners’ previously acquired knowledge structures are called schemata cultural knowledge is critical in Chinese as a foreign language learning. Culture-specific values can be significant factors in comprehension if the values expressed by the text differ from the values held by the learners’ comprehension. Two types of schemas are critical to language comprehension in this study. The first schema is Chinese culture schema. During Chinese language learning, when the content schema was culturally Chinese specific and not a part of participant’s cultural background knowledge, the comprehension of Chinese became difficult. Besides the schema of cultural knowledge, the other type of schema is Chinese language specific. Language proficiency is required for Chinese as learners to activate relevant schemata and gain comprehension. As English-speaking participants in this study, participants had several difficulties activating their Chinese culture and language-related schema in learning process. The study discussed the various cultural instruction methods in Chinese as a foreign language teaching.

14:05-14:30

68590 | A Comparison of Media Literacy Education in Finland and in Taiwan

Teresa Chen, California State University, Long Beach, United States

This presentation will report on a comparative study that examines media literacy education in Finland and in Taiwan with a focus on their relevant education policies and curricula. The session will discuss the background of the study, describe the method, and share findings and recommendations for future practice. Finland and Taiwan both face longstanding media influence and warfare launched by their neighboring country (i.e., Russia and China, respectively). Finland, which is ranked top on the most recent Media Literacy Index (Lessenski, 2022), has shown its success in addressing prominent issues associated with disinformation and misinformation. Likewise, also as one of the strongest democracies in the world (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021), Taiwan has taken a variety of measures to combat similar problems concerning media to safeguard its vulnerable democratic lifestyle. The goals of this study are to identify lessons learned and to highlight best practices that are emerged in their promotion of media literacy. The design and implementation of the study followed a systematic qualitative comparative analysis approach. Taking cultural and social settings into consideration, the study analyzed relevant documents (including white papers and scholarly articles), synthesized similarities and differences, and identifies patterns and trends. The preliminary themes obtained from the analysis included (a) historical background, (b) the purpose, scope, and foci of media literacy policies, as well as (c) core competencies, skills, and assessments in the curriculum guides. This presentation will conclude with recommendations for instruction and research, which will be of interest to academic professionals, educators, and policy makers.

14:30-14:55

70675 | Regional Unified Numeracy Test (RUNT) Results Toward Digital Learning Nuggets Development

Anelyn Montes, Calinog National Comprehensive High School, Philippines

Chive Gabasa, West Visayas State University, Philippines

This study was conducted to develop and evaluate digital learning nuggets based on the Regional Unified Numeracy Test results of Grade 7 learners. The participants of the study were the Grade 7 learners of Calinog National Comprehensive High School during the school year 2019-2020 who were identified for remediation in numeracy. The instrument used in the study was the evaluation for non-printed instructional materials evaluation form adopted from West Visayas State University which was found reliable with a Cronbach’s Alpha value of 0.77. The descriptive statistics used were frequency count, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. Moreover, design research using ASSURE model gave birth to the creation of Mathon-An, a digital learning nuggets developed to address the concern for numeracy and was used as amaterial for the remediation of the non–numerates. It contains exercises, examples, and assessment of the four fundamental mathematical operations. The experiences of the participants during the conduct of the study were also taken on the use of the digital learning nuggets for the qualitative data. The findings revealed that the acceptability of the Digital Learning Nuggets (Mathon-An) was rated by the learners and experts as "very acceptable". Thus, Mathon-An was considered as having the potential for further mathematics remediation by gauging the content knowledge of the students to technology use while doing the basic fundamental operations in mathematics.

14:55-15:20

68366

| Creating a MOOC To Assist Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) Undergraduates With the Learning of Spoken Cantonese: Challenges and Solutions

Yuet Wai Wong, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Chun Yip Tse, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

With an increasing number of students of ethnic minority in the Education University of Hong Kong, a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for learning spoken Cantonese was designed in 2020 and was completed in 2022. The platform aimed at providing additional support to Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. The researchers were the principal project leaders. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented. It was comprised of three parts: a self-reflective study, a questionnaire survey and an in-depth individual interview. It was found that there were five main challenges: learners’ difficulty in learning Cantonese as a tonal language (Chan & Li, 2000), a diversity of their ethnicities, a wide gap of learning differences, a low level of motivation, and finally a limited budget and labour for the creation of the MOOC (Barak et al., 2016). To address those issues, a bundle of solutions was implemented. Topics and learning objects were plotted on a scale of difficulty. After students had practiced pronunciation of items ranging from mono-syllabic words to polysyllabic words or phrases, they had to practise multi-levelled tasks in different real-life situational contexts. Motivation was enhanced by the use of visuals, audios, learning videos and a scoring mechanism incorporated in the platform. During the production of the learning videos, students also played the roles of characters and hence provided them with more guided and authentic learning experiences. It was concluded that those methods were mostly effective in addressing the challenges.