Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing

Partial-flipped Class

Jingyi Zhao
FS19-TE-808-703 Inquiry Into Classroom Teaching

Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing

Partial-flipped Class

Jingyi Zhao

Michigan State University

Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

Description of My Teaching Situation (the Context)

I teach at a Chinese immersion elementary school in Lansing, Michigan. This is the third year I
have been teaching at this school. The students mostly come from low to middle income and
socio-economic classes. Students spend half day in Chinese classroom and half day in English
classroom. My second grade class has 17 students. Some of them were my first grade students
last year, and some of them were my kindergarten students the year before last year, so basically
I have a good knowledge of their levels and capacities. My second grade students are well
behaved, love learning, and most of them are willing to take responsibilities and challenges for
their learning. Some of them are proactive learners, yet some of them often need extra reminders,
help, or encouragement to keep them moving forward.

Description of An Issue/Problem/Situation That I Would Like to Address for This Project

Reading and writing Chinese characters are very difficult for foreign learners. With the Chinese
literacy fundamental skills we have started to build since the first grade, most of my second
grade students now are able to read Chinese characters of their levels. Yet, the four skills of
language learning are not only about listening, speaking and reading. When it comes to writing,
if there is no reference such as written vocabularies on blackboard or printed materials provided
for them to look up to, they would not be able to write things to express their thoughts, ideas or
opinions. Because they do not know/remember how to write Chinese characters, and since PreK,
they have never been taught to write Chinese by memory.

A Justification for Why This Is An Important Topic on Which to Focus

This topic is important because eventually students should be able to write Chinese characters by
memory so that they can use this language to communicate with others, to express their thoughts,
to create their projects, etc. Also, being able to write Chinese will help their other language
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

skills, and help them think using Chinese, as well as practice them on flexibly applying Chinese
like the ability of using the same vocabulary to make up different sentences.

Research Question

Main research question: How to facilitate students’ Chinese writing by teaching Chinese
strokes/radicals and implementing partial-flip classroom? In order to improve students’ Chinese
writing, I will implement sentence dictation, composition/story writing tasks, Chinese
stroke/radical learning and analyzing games, content-based writing projects, reading
comprehension forms, and send home preview/review materials constantly, etc.

Sub-questions: should the teacher teach how to write Chinese? How to use the time that students
spend at home to support their learning/practice on Chinese writing? What do we do in class to
provide students with opportunities for practicing, applying, and improving Chinese writing?

Literature Review

As I started to read literature and references to support my action research, there were three
questions emerging from my mind. One question was that what are the needs of my students
learning to write Chinese characters and Chinese writing composition? Does the improvement of
Chinese writing skills benefit Chinese reading skills? (because for second grade students’
assessments, reading occupies bigger portion than writing.) The second one was that how can I
teach them to effectively write Chinese characters and make syntactically correct sentences? The
third question was that what work I can assign my students to do at home and what tasks I should
design for them to do in class, if I implement partial-flip class to improve their Chinese writing
outcomes?

Hence, I started to read about students’ needs. Considering the different types of needs described
in The Elements of Language Curriculum, such as situation needs and language needs, subjective
and objective needs, my claim that my students do need to learn and improve their Chinese
writing ability has been proved and justified.
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

Then I moved to my second question and hoped that I could find meaningful information or
instructional solutions. First I reread one of my textbooks during my previous Master courses in
China. The title of this book is Introduction of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language,
written by a Chinese scholar, focusing on the main theories of teaching Chinese as a foreign
language. In this book, it mentioned some methods to teach Chinese characters by teaching
Chinese radicals first, and some theories about scaffolding the sentence structures or using
phrase patterns to practice syntactic awareness. Whereas there was an argument about the
teaching sequences of listening/speaking and reading/writing. Some claimed that writing should
be taught much later, while some said that writing should be taught along with other three skills.

So I was then seeking for answers and more information from the scholars/educators who teach
and research in the U.S. or a country other than China, in order to find information that is more
suitable for my situation.

Looking across studies, writing research in Chinese has focused on Chinese character acquisition
and character recognition. “Traditionally, the problem has been approached through stroke
extraction, but each character typically has a large number of strokes in a complex spatial
relationship with one another. Fortunately, the many thousands of Chinese characters can be
composed from a relatively small number of basic shapes, or radicals, in a specific spatial
relationship. Radical recognition can be treated as model-based shape extraction from a given
image, avoiding the complexities of stroke extraction.[ Shi , Gunn, Damper, 2003]”

Chinese characters are non-alphabetic and morphosyllabic, in which many symbols represent
words or morphemes. Compared with alphabetic languages, the pronunciation of the Chinese
characters is not clear enough for supporting to decode the shape and meaning, but for some
characters, the pronunciation can provide a clue on the radicals which shape a certain character.
Recognizing and writing Chinese characters are two difficult tasks because Chinese has complex
structures, intricate interconnection between the components, flexible pattern variations, lack of
dynamic information, and a large number of characters. Some scholars said that Chinese is a
morpho-syllabic language.In this system, each character usually maps onto one morpheme
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

radical and one syllable radical (Hoosain, 1992 Hoosain, R. (1992). Psychological reality of the
word in Chinese. In H.-C. Chen & O. J. L. Tzeng (Eds.), Language processing in Chinese (pp.
111–130). Amsterdam: North-Holland.). “For example, the character 锌 [san1] <ZINC> contains
the semantic radical 金 <metal-related>, which gives clues to its meaning, and the phonetic
radical 辛 [san1] <suffering>, which gives clues to its phonology. [8]”Studies have reported that
semantic and phonetic radicals are involved in reading phonetic compounds, and help learners to
understand, remember, and write Chinese characters. A research used a writing-to-dictation task
to compare neurotypical participants’ performance on writing characters with homophones
sharing different phonetic radicals and another set characters with homophones sharing the same
phonetic radicals. The first set was regarded as both syllable-to-character and syllable-to-radical
inconsistent, and the second set was regarded as syllable-to-radical but not syllable-to-character.
The results of the error analysis showed that there was a bigger tendency to make errors with
preserved phonetic radicals in the second set. So it could be an evidence that phonetic radicals
play a critical role in Chinese character writing, and phonology-to-orthography conversion also
contribute to Chinese character writing.

Aside from Chinese characters, the relationship between Chinese reading and writing is
important to my action research as well. Language skills includes listening, speaking, reading,
and writing.Countless researches have showed well that reading reading skills is closely related
to listening skills, especially the sensitivity to phonological structures of speaking a language. In
addition, studies have been hypothesized that the close relationship between reading and
listening is universal across languages.When we talk about Chinese language, it brought us a
unique system as Chinese characters are based more on meaning rather than phonology.
According to a study, the skills of Chinese reading have strong relevance with the skills of
Chinese writing.The article Reading Depends on Writing, in Chinese provides a good point,“the
role of logograph writing in reading development is mediated by two possibly interacting
mechanisms. The first is orthographic awareness, which facilitates the development of coherent,
effective links among visual symbols, phonology, and semantics; the second involves the
establishment of motor programs that lead to the formation of long-term motor memories of
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

Chinese characters. These findings yield a unique insight into how cognitive systems responsible
for reading development and reading disability interact, and they challenge the prominent
phonological awareness view.[ Tan, pinks, Eden, Perfetti, Siok, 2005]”

Due to the fact that each Chinese character consists of strokes and radicals that are packed into a
square configuration or shape, possessing a high, nonlinear visual complexity, and
visual-orthographic processing is an important part of character reading, therefore, an integrated
reading circuit that links orthography, meaning, and pronunciation is very important for reading
and writing.The article Reading Depends on Writing, in Chinese also suggested that “the
visual–orthographic demands of written Chinese necessitate what has become a prevalent
strategy for teaching children to learn to read, namely asking children to repeatedly copy, by
writing down, samples of single characters. Through writing, children learn to deconstruct
characters into a unique pattern of strokes and components and then regroup these subcharacters
into a square linguistic unit. This type of decoding occurs at the visual– orthographic level and is
assumed to facilitate children’s awareness of the character’s internal structure (orthographic
awareness). This awareness supports the formation of connections among orthographic,
semantic, and phonological units of the Chinese writing system [ Tan, pinks, Eden, Perfetti, Siok,
2005]” Morphological awareness and writing, syntactic processing and writing, reading skills
and writing skills, those concepts are all important. researches have shown that reading skills and
writing skills are closely related. “It is not surprising that learning to read and write draws on
many of the same skills. This includes 1) declarative knowledge (e.g., lexical knowledge of
grapheme‐phoneme correspondence, morphological and syntactical awareness); 2) procedural
knowledge (e.g., accessing general knowledge to incorporate with linguistic and cognitive
processes); 3) domain knowledge such as vocabulary, word meaning and prior knowledge; and
4) meta‐knowledge, which includes pragmatics, knowing the interaction between readers and
writers, monitoring one's meaning‐making and word identification or production strategies
(Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000). [Guan, Zhao, Kit, Kwok, Wang, 2018]” Thus, we can say that
the knowledge or skills that are fostered through Chinese writing also help the development of
Chinese reading, and vice versa.
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

From the reading summarized briefly as above, I have found a clear guide to answer my second
question. I switched then to read about flip classroom, and was hoping that I would find
potentials ways in which I can implement in my own class to help my students gain their ability
of Chinese writing.

Flip class becomes more popular as a pedagogical method because of its feature of helping
learning outcomes. Some studies indicated that students in flip classrooms were less satisfied
with how the in-class and after-class structured oriented them to the learning tasks, but by
implementing flip classroom, students had more chances to do cooperative learning and apply a
language/knowledge. This kind of findings emphasized on how to contribute to the stability and
connectedness of classroom learning structures.

In a flip classroom, students usually are expected to read course material before coming to class
and engage the concepts at a deeper level during class. “This pedagogy normally incorporates
multimedia technology into the curriculum, but students can do a variety of activities including
watching a pre-recorded lecture, watching an interactive video, listening to a podcast or reading
an assigned textbook chapter.[Lax, Morris & Kolber, 2017]” Researches have shown that a good
structure between the in-class portion and the after-class portion of the learning experience is
crucial for a flip classroom to be successful. These two portions should coherently and
consistently support one another. Also, researches have shown that successful a flip classroom
teacher would go beyond just replacing the lecture with an online learning event, especially if the
students are very young and lack of efficient self-learning abilities.

Among many studies and theories related to flip classroom, I was inspired a lot by the theory of
knowledge space and students’ knowledge states. It said that “they will be ready to learn new
items in the domain. These ready-to-learn items are called the outer-fringe. Similarly, there
would be items that students understand but have not quite mastered; these items are called the
inner fringe. According to knowledge space theory, as students strengthen their understanding of
inner-fringe items, those items become part of their knowledge state and, as students work to
learn new content, outer-fringe items move to the inner fringe. Working in this way, students are
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

able to progress through a learning path of ever-growing knowledge states, eventually ending
with mastery of the domain.[Strayer, 2012]”

In the article Partial Flip Classroom Exercise in A Large Introductory General Biology Course
Increases Performance at Multiple Levels, educators incorporated a ‘partial-flip’ form into an
introductory general biology course, where only a portion of the class time was spent in a flipped
classroom format. As the results, the partial flip students scored higher on in-class formative
questions, specific exam questions and final exam essay questions, and the partial flip
manipulation appeared equally effective in aiding both below and above average students in
formative assessments.“This model of teaching requires students to invest their own time in
preparatory work before class and learn the material at their own pace. Then, in class, students
spend time in groups, working together, discussing and answering questions while working on
questions or activities related to the pre-class exercise. The instructor, instead of lecturing on the
class material, acts as a guide for students, answering questions and helping students with the
in-class activity. By working through basic concepts on their own during the pre-class activity,
students spend class time in a greater cognitive engagement with the material, thereby facilitating
deeper learning and better mastery of concepts. Studies have shown that flipped classroom
students perform better on exams and have a more enjoyable classroom experience than
traditional.[Lax, Morris & Kolber, 2017]” even though it was implemented in a science
curriculum, I still found the concept of partial-flip inspired me and this format will suit my
situation and benefit my action research.

I searched and read the references according to my specific questions aimed at my action
research, Hence, they are related to and will guide my plans of implementation.

Design and Methods

I will study on my second grade students for this action research. My students’ information and
my study settings are described in the introduction part.
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

In order to collect and analyze data, I plan to use 4 or 5 tools as the follows:

1. Observation. I will constantly observe my students’ progresses and problems of writing and
reading tasks, such as observing their comprehension of the Chinese leveled reading books,
observing their daily performances when they are creating and writing down sentences,
observing them on recognizing learned vocabularies, observing their dictation process, etc.

2. Journals. I will keep a journal to record noticeable progresses and critical issues during the
implementation of this research.

3. Rating scales/rating rubric. I have two rubrics for the sentence dictation task and writing
composition/story writing. In the rubrics, both students and parents can see the writing samples
for each rating scales, and I rate their work from 1 to 4 (4 is the highest score); I also explain to
them about how and why they get a certain score. By looking at their work and the scores on my
students’ own notebooks throughout this semester, I can analyze their progresses and weaknesses
on Chinese writing, and then address some problems or adjust my further teaching plan.

4. Photography. I take some photos of my students’ work or some short videos of their
learning/working processes, to take record or help me reflect. I only take photos/videos of the
students who have given their permissions to me or our school by receiving their permit forms or
ask their parents orally.

5. Reading/recognition check. I will check individually on their reading and recognition of the
vocabulary lists sent home, the online leveled reading books, and let them individually report to
me about their in-class projects/worksheets.

6. Interview. I will only privately ask some students who have made noticeable progress or have
had big struggles about their personal feelings and learning experiences.

My role is first a teacher and then an educator researcher. I will use my knowledge and findings
to improve my instructions to my students, and then try to make more meaningful and
instructional findings based on my implementation plan and my students’ learning progresses.
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

The initial timeline for my study is as follows:

September: observe and analyze my students’ learning needs and learning experiences; establish
the research questions; read references to support my study.

October: summarize literature review; design the action plan including the study tools and the
implementation methods; start the implementation plan.

November: continue to implement my instructions; collect data using the 4 or 5 study tools
described as above; adjust my instructions according to the data.

December: analyze data collected; reflect on the findings from my study; complete the final
report.

In my implementation plan, I will be using methods as the follows to develop my students’

Chinese writing ability:

1. Teaching my students to write Chinese characters by introducing Chinese strokes and radicals.

2. Implement partial-flipped class to maximize in-class learning time, which means I will assign
homework constantly such as reviewing/memorizing/practice writing word lists (with parents’
supervision), reading leveled books and completing quiz on LevelChinese website (students have
their own account), watching videos and then summarizing by writing down key
words/sentences (accompanied with drawing pictures accepted), previewing materials of the
background knowledge, etc. When students are in my class, we will walk through important
concepts or language contents, practice sentence structures by scaffolding and expanding
sentence components, complete dictation and composition writing, complete LevelChinese
reading comprehension forms, and spend as much time as possible for learning tasks/projects.

Data Analysis and Findings

We did dictation one or two times a week, each time students wrote down 3-4 sentences by
listening to the sentences I said and I read each sentence 3 times. The rubric for the dictation
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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demonstrates: get 1 point if students write only some key words; get 2 points if students write
key phrases to enable the meanings of the sentences to be comprehended by the aid of guessing;
get 3 points if students write the full sentences and the sentences are comprehensible except for
less than one subtle grammar omit/error or detailed word in each sentence; get 4 points if
students write the full sentences and the sentences are comprehensible except for less than 1
subtle grammar omit/error or detailed word in three sentences. We also corrected the answers
together right after the dictations. During the correction, students got involved to analyze the
sentences and make further practice on their errors. Moreover, we shared students’ good works
and explained what made them good works.

By looking at Table 1, we can see that most of my students made progress on the Chinese
sentence dictation. This activity required students to understand what sentences the teacher said,
recognize and choose the correct Chinese characters or words from their memory, write down
each character/word by memory, and process the grammar by thinking and reading their own
sentences because each sentence was said only three times. Even though students’ progresses
showed in different paces, but their abilities of dictation writing was gradually moving forward.
However, except for a student who is new to our school and new to Chinese program, there still
are 3 or 4 more students who either barely showed progress or merely showed a small progress.
Two of them are fine with listening and speaking but weak at reading and writing; another two
are weak at all four language skills. (Table 1)

Table 1

Dictation scores

9/1 9/2 10/ 10/1 10/1 10/2 10/2 11/ 11/1 11/1 11/2
6 5 7 4 8 3 8 4 2 8 2

Student 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 2
1
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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Student 2 1 2 2 3 2 3 3 3 4 3
2

Student 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 3 2 2
3

Student 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3
4

Student 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 2 3 1 2
5

Student 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1
6

Student 1 1 1 2 2 3 2 3 3 4 2
7

Student 1 1 2 2 2 3 2 3 2 3 3
8

Student 1 2 2 1 2 3 3 3 4 4 2
9

Student 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 2
10

Student 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2
11

Student 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 2 2
12
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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Student 2 2 2 3 2 2 3 3 2 4 3
13

Student 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 3
14

Student 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 3 3 2
15

Student 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1
16

Student 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 3 2 3 2
17

We did composition writing/story writing once every two weeks. For example, each student was
expected to pick 10 word cards and then write a short story using at least five of the word cards
which they picked. For another instance, each student was required to first read a writing prompt
or a story, and then write a short paragraph according to the real-world scenario writing task.
Give another example, students looked at some pictures and then wrote a short story book in
small groups. Note that students had access to the printed vocabulary lists so that they could use
for reference when they wanted during writing. But there was only Chinese on the vocabulary
lists, no picture clues or English translations, so they would need to recognize the vocabulary if
they wanted to use them. Each time before students wrote, I gave them a writing example, and
each time after they finished the work, we would have some of them read their writings to the
whole group, or pair up students and let them read to each other.

The purposes of implementing composition writing/story writing in my class are: helping my

students realize that they can apply the language to express their ideas and produce things; with
practicing writing their own works, they will be better at reading and comprehending the
textbooks or story books; giving them more opportunities to memorize and practice writing
Chinese characters. The rubric for the composition writing/story writing demonstrates: get 1
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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point if students write relevant words but the words do not structure a story or do not fulfill the
real-word scenario; get 2 points if students write relevant phrases connected to one another to
structure a story, or write relevant full sentences but not connected to one another to structure a
story; get 3 points if students write a story with main characters, beginning, actions, things, and
ending, or write a short paragraph fulfilling the real-world scenario task, but with some
words/characters/grammar errors; get 4 points if students write a story with main characters,
beginning, actions, things, and ending, or write a short paragraph fulfilling the real-world
scenario task, and only have very subtle or no errors.

Table 2 shows the gradual progress of my students’ Chinese writing skills since we have started
to implement partial-flipped class and teach/learn Chinese strokes and radicals. Also, I have
found that five students had opposite situations between dictation and composition/story writing.
Three of them had higher points and bigger growth in dictation while lower points and smaller
growth in composition/story writing; another two of them had the opposite situation from the
three students. After my further observation and talking with these students, I found some other
factors that caused this situation, such as confusion with structuring a story, difficulty with
recognizing the characters/words on the vocabulary list, difficulty with writing Chinese by
memory, and conflicts during discussing on a group idea. (Table 2)

Table 2

Composition writing/story writing scores

10/10 10/23 11/7 11/19

Student 1 1 2 3 3

Student 2 1 3 3 4

Student 3 1 2 3 3

Student 4 1 2 4 4
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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Student 5 1 2 4 3

Student 6 1 2 2 3

Student 7 1 2 3 3

Student 8 1 2 2 2

Student 9 1 2 2 3

Student 10 1 1 2 2

Student 11 1 2 1 2

Student 12 1 1 2 2

Student 13 1 1 0 2

Student 14 1 1 2 2

Student 15 1 1 0 1

Student 16 0 0 1 1

Student 17 0 0 0 1

Based on students’ writing scores, my journal, interviews with 9 students, and the photos/videos
I took constantly of their works and learning process, I decided to implement individual help
session and individual progress check. Most days of each week, during morning work time and
recess time, I either let some students come to me individually and help them with their own
weakness related to reading and writing, or check their reading/recognition of words and
sentences (Even though this research is about Chinese writing, but the main purpose of
improving students writing skills is to support and benefit their reading skills). Table 3 shows the
percentage of students’ correct read/recognition of the words and sentences that I pointed to
them. After implementing individual help with students’ own weaknesses related to Chinese
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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reading and writing shown from the data, the majority of my students recognized/read correctly
more words and sentences that they have learned and practiced in the class or at home. Some of
them made a progress as expected, however, some of them only made a very small progress.
(Table 3)

Table 3

Individual reading/recognition check

10/28 11/13 11/21

Student 1 40% 42% 47%

Student 2 80% 88% 96%

Student 3 54% 65% 73%

Student 4 53% 72% 80%

Student 5 72% 82% 89%

Student 6 44% 58% 72%

Student 7 50% 59% 63%

Student 8 48% 66% 82%

Student 9 70% 92% 84%

Student 10 16% 27% 33%

Student 11 5% 5% 10%

Student 12 50% 56% 64%

Student 13 83% 90% 97%

Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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Student 14 30% 33% 34%

Student 15 15% 20% 35%

Student 16 0 0 5%

Student 17 45% 67% 71%

In my journal, I recorded the private interviews I had with 9 of my students, and I asked two
questions: 1. What did they do to make the noticeable progresses; 2. what big struggles do they
have when they learn or practice Chinese reading or writing.

By reading my journal, I found that there were three effective ways that contributed to their
learning: 1. complete weekly homework and constantly practice at home using the materials sent
home and online resources that I assigned to them. Some students told me that their parents
helped them make flash cards of the vocabulary on the vocabulary lists, and they put flashcards
in order to make sentences, or wrote down sentences using words on the vocabulary lists. Some
of them told me that they liked reading and doing the quiz I assigned online, so they understood
better and learned faster in class. 2. use the new way to remember Chinese characters, which
means using Chinese strokes and radicals to remember a Chinese character. Before we
introduced Chinese strokes and radicals, students thought Chinese characters are made of
random lines like drawings, so they found hard to remember those characters. But some of them
were open to try the new ways. Some of them liked how we analyzed which strokes/radicals a
certain character contains, some liked the animations and online games we used to demonstrate
strokes/radicals, some liked that we connect the sound of a stroke/radical to the shape of the
stroke/radical using the audio stroke and radical posters, some liked the puzzle games or writing
practice session we had to practice strokes and radicals, some liked how we used pictures and
stories to interpret the radicals and characters. They said it was hard to remember the strokes and
radicals at the beginning, but later they found it’s helpful. 3. “we are not robots, we are human.”
Think and read during or after doing a writing activity. Some students told me that they read
what they were writing down no matter it was a writing practice worksheet or a creative writing
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

task. Some of them told me that they tried not to only use same vocabulary every time, instead,
to use one or two words that they did not use before when they were doing in-class projects or
writing tasks (they have printed word lists and materials in their own drawer, and we also posted
many writing samples and vocabulry on the wall/blackboard), then they could memorize and use
more vocabulary. I also let students to share and demonstrate their successful learning methods
to the whole group.

The purpose of improving second grade students’ Chinese writing skills is to support and help
their Chinese reading and comprehension. We did comprehension forms after we leaned a
textbook. In the comprehension forms, there were questions such as what is the title of the book,
how many main characters and who are they, which action words you find in the book, what
things you find in the book, which sentence(s) tell (s) you ......, do you like the book and why,
etc. Students were required to write down their answers and draw pictures to show what they
wrote down. With the implementation of this research, students’ results/scores of completing the
comprehension forms has been improved to some extent. (Table 4)

Table 4

Scores (1 points -10 points) of reading comprehension forms

Textbook Textbook Textbook Textbook Textbook Textbook

1 2 3 4 5 6

Student 1 4 5 4 4 5 6

Student 2 6 8 8 9 9 9

Student 3 5 6 6 7 8 7

Student 4 4 4 5 6 5 7

Student 5 3 5 7 8 4 7
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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Student 6 1 2 2 2 3 2

Student 7 4 4 5 5 6 6

Student 8 4 5 7 7 8 8

Student 9 6 6 8 9 8 7

Student 10 2 1 2 3 3 3

Student 11 1 1 3 4 6 6

Student 12 3 4 6 5 7 5

Student 13 6 8 8 7 8 9

Student 14 1 3 3 4 4 4

Student 15 1 2 2 2 3 2

Student 16 1 1 1 1 1 1

Student 17 2 4 7 6 7 6

Note that there must be some other factors influenced the scores of the comprehension forms of
each text book, such as students’ behavior, the connection between the topics of the textbooks
and students’ interests, the difficulty of different text books, etc. But generally speaking, after
we implemented this action plan, students’ comprehension form results has been better.

Based on my observation and the photos/videos of students’ works, I have noticed the following
situations: 1. students’ character writing is more organized and correct, not like before, looked
like putting random lines together, and the speed of them writing a character or a sentence is
faster than before; 2. students have gained the awareness of grammar, since we had more time to
learn and practice the structure of a sentence instead of spending much time on mechanically
memorizing and practicing characters or words; 3. students are using the language more flexibly,
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
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such as making more creative sentences when they were choosing two cards to write a sentence,
or writing their story books, etc. Because they did much preview and review at home, such as
reading, copying word lists, summarizing key words/phrases, quiz, watching learning videos,
etc., so we had more time in the class for learning projects and real-world scenario tasks, so they
could improve the ability of applying the language; 4. their reading fluency is better now and the
transition from word learning to reading texts is more smooth. It is because that many of them
know that they can remember a character by memorizing its strokes or radicals, and they got
more chances to use the new learned words and previously learned words; 5. however, a few of
them feel more confused now because they thought they need to not only remember the
characters, but also remember the strokes and radicals. I think those students need more time,
practice and help to take in this new knowledge. Now I have taught 15 strokes and 20 radicals,
but there will be more to be taught. So I need to think a way to address this problem; 6. students’
interest in Chinese writing has gained compared to before since Chinese writing is always a hard
task to do. Now most of my students are more confident at Chinese writing, and willing to read
their writings to others; 7. yet a big problem that we are facing is family support. A few students
were frustrated and sad about their small progress, because they do not have computers or some
other devices at home, or their parents scheduled many activities after school and during
weekends, or they do not know where their parents place the learning materials sent home, so
they could not finish homework or practice at home. I need to think of ways to address this
“side-effect” of implementing a partial-flipped class.

Summary

This project was aimed to improve students’ Chinese writing skills such as the fluency and
correction of character writing, writing Chinese by memory, and composition/story writing.
Also, this project was to seek for the positive influence which the improvement of Chinese
writing had on the improvement of Chinese reading/recognition and comprehension. The main
research question is how to facilitate students’ Chinese writing by teaching Chinese
strokes/radicals and implementing partial-flip classroom? And the sub-questions include should
the teacher teach how to write Chinese? How to use the time that students spend at home to
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

support their learning/practice on Chinese writing? What do we do in class to provide students

with opportunities for practicing, applying, and improving Chinese writing?

During the past two months, my second grade class implemented a partial-flipped class, which
required students to do some work at home such as preview/review, memorizing and copying
vocabulary, reading online leveled books and completing quiz, watching videos, writing down to
summarize key words or main information from a text, writing sentences using assigned
words/characters, etc. While in class, students were spending more time on sentence dictation,
real-world scenario composition writing tasks, creative story writings, poster writing like venn
diagram or map, addressing questions about grammar or sentence structures, completing
different comprehension forms, analyzing and practicing Chinese strokes and radicals by games
and activities, and receiving individual help with their own weaknesses from me.

By looking at the analysis of the data collected, the following briefly summarizes some
meaningful findings:

1.Learning Chinese strokes and radicals helped most of my students fasten the speed of
memorizing a Chinese character, increased the correction of character writing, and so increased
their confidence to learning Chinese characters.

2.In-class sentence dictation and activities of making sentences like picking two word cards to
write a sentence motivated/reminded students to constantly do homework, enhanced their ability
of connecting listening or reading messages to writing, and increased the chances of the common
used vocabulary to be practiced. With the implementation of this project, most of my students
have shown a growth of their sentence writing according to their higher dictation scores
compared to before.

3.There were 8 out of 17 students showed a big progress on their composition/story writing; 9
students only showed a small progress yet the majority of them did make progress. By looking at
their composition/story writing scores over time, the photos of their writing works, and based on
the writing rubric, evidences showed that half of them now can apply the language much more
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

flexibly by making more creative sentences to express their own ideas, not like before most of
time was copying the teacher’s ideas or sentences/stories; another half at least have gained the
awareness that they can use the language to fulfill a practical purpose and express their
ideas/feelings, also, their motivation and interest in applying the language has been increased and
they will keep making progresses even though they may follow a slower pace.

4.By implementing partial-flipped class, the teacher have gotten more time for helping students
individually with their own weaknesses or confusions instead of spending much time on doing
whole group mechanical drilling activities. Based on the scores of the comprehension forms and
the individual check/progress monitoring of their reading/recognition, students have shown a
better comprehension to the textbooks and higher percentages of vocabulary/sentences reading
and recognition.

Connections

This project was focused on Chinese writing, however, for second grade students, their
curriculum goals and end of school year assessments are still emphasize more on
reading/recognition and listening. A big reason why I decided to work on my students’ Chinese
writing skills was that I found their lower interest/confidence to Chinese writing and their low
Chinese writing skills hindered the further progresses they could make on their Chinese learning
especially Chinese reading. Through this project, my students and I have seen that with their
improvement of Chinese writing, their reading/recognition skills have been improved too.
Moreover, their abilities of connecting four language skills together and enhancing the four skills
mutually have been improved as well.

The purpose of learning a language is to apply it. With this project’ implementation, my students
enjoyed using what they learned to actually do things or express themselves. It is a good way to
connect what they have learned to their real life.

The improvement of Chinese literacy skills also benefits the English literacy skills. Except for
staying half a day in Chinese class, my students stay half a day in English class as well. My
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

English partner teacher and I have collaborative meetings once or twice a week to discuss unit
plans and lesson plans. During our meetings in the past two months, we planned to connect what
literacy skills would be taught in both classes so that students can have more chances to take in,
compare, summarize, practice, and benefit from two languages.

Implications

This project has found some useful information, experiences and results towards making
improvement of students’ Chinese writing skills and its positive impacts on students’ Chinese
recognition, reading and comprehension. According to this project’s data analysis and findings,
teaching Chinese strokes and radicals, and implementing partial-flipped class may be considered
as helpful or effective ways to improve students’ Chinese writing and reading/recognition.
Hence, I will continue to implement this teaching method throughout this school year and keep
track on the data. If students’ progresses go as I have predicted based on this research, then there
will be further improvement. Alos, I will keep my mind open to any necessary adjustment in
order to better fit my students’ further progresses.

Further Study

If seeking for more convincing or more determined conclusion, there should be more students
with diverse background involved in and longer time for the implementation phase in the
research, so that there can be more data and more thorough analysis. I also need to learn more
from others’ researches/studies and articles, papers, and/or books, such as teaching techniques on
helping students practice Chinese radicals, more fun ways to implement writing tasks, combining
with students’ different learning styles, etc., in order to know better about how to improve
students’ Chinese writing, Chinese character writing, flip class or partial-flip class, the
connection between writing and reading/recognition, etc.

Reflections
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

It is a happy situation for me, my students and the parents to see that after two months, the
students’ Chinese writing skills showed progresses, their interests in reading Chinese books and
writing Chinese sentences or stories have been increased, as well as their Chinese recognition
and reading comprehension improved too.

However, during the implementation of the project, I found there were two problems that I
should address. One is that I will give students more time and use more diverse activities to help
them take in, memorize, and practice the knowledge of Chinese strokes and radicals. Another
one is that I need to think of more ways to assign homework, so that all my students can
constantly have access to their homework. No matter they have high-tech devices at home or not,
they should be able to learn or practice at home and have access to all the learning materials and
resources. Also, maybe I will communicate with some parents about supporting their child’s
learning at home by providing stable and enough learning/homework time, or keeping learning
materials at a place where their child can easily find. Moreover, I will read more literacy to seek
for effective and instructional ways to help those students who are at lower level of Chinese
composition/story writing make bigger progresses. I hope that I can use the knowledge and
experience which I have gained from doing this project on my future action plans.

Reference

1. James Dean Brown.(1994)The Elements of Language Curriculum.35–70.Newbury House

Teacher Development.

2. Xun Liu.(2000) Introduction of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language.Peking University

Press.

3. Connie Qun Guan, Feifei Ye, Richard K. Wagner, Wanjin Meng. (2013) Developmental and
individual differences in Chinese writing. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal,
1031-1056
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

4. Dustin Kai-Yan Lau&Karen Hau-Wan Ma. (2018) A Phonetic Radical Account of The
Phonology-to-Orthography Consistency Effect on Writing Chinese Characters: Evidence from A
Chinese Dysgraphic Patient. Cognitive Neuropsychology Journal, 403-414.

5. D. Shi , S.R. Gunn, R.I. Damper. (2003) Handwritten Chinese radical recognition using
nonlinear active shape models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
227-280.
6. Li Hai Tan, John A. Spinks, Guinevere F. Eden, Charles A. Perfetti, Wai Ting Siok.(2005)
Reading Depends on Writing, in Chinese. PNAS
7. Connie Qun Guan, Jianrong Zhao, Rosa Kit, Wan Kwok, Ye Wang.(2018) How does
morphosyntactic skill contribute to different genres of Chinese writing from grades 3 to
6?Journal of Research in Reading.
8. Jeremy F. Strayer (2012) How Learning in An Inverted Classroom Influences Cooperation,
Innovation and Task Orientation. Learning environment Research Journal, 171-193.
9. Ai-hua Wang, Jun-jie Qi, Zeng-xin Li. Case and analysis of flip classroom based on
micro-course video. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science.
10. ShaoLan Shueh. (2014) Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese. Chineasy.
11. Neil Lax,James Morris & Benedict J. Kolber. (2017)A partial flip classroom exercise in a
large introductory general biology course increases performance at multiple levels. Journal of
Biological Education, 412-426.
Appendix

Sentence Dictation Rubric

Scores Explanation Writing Example

1 write some key words 1. 我 苹果

2. 今天 我 哥哥

3. 这 什么
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

2 write key phrases to enable the 1. 我 吃苹果

meanings of the sentences to be
2. 今天 我 哥哥 画
comprehended by the aid of
guessing 3. 这 老师 什么？

3 write the full sentences and the 1. 我喜欢吃苹果。

sentences are comprehensible
2. 今天 我和哥哥画画。
except for less than one subtle
grammar omit/error or detailed 3. 这个 老师 什么？
word in each sentence

4 write the full sentences and the 1. 我喜欢吃苹果。

sentences are comprehensible
2. 今天早上我和哥哥画画。
except for less than one subtle
grammar omit/error or detailed 3. 这个老师叫什么？
word in three sentences

Composition/Story Writing Rubric

Scores Explanation Writing Example

1 write relevant words but the 你好！ 你 我 。我的 有 。 我的姐姐

words do not structure a story or 我的妹妹 我的小狗 。 我 吃。
do not fulfill the real-word
scenario
Facilitate Chinese Writing by teaching Chinese strokes/radicals and Implementing
Partial-flipped Class

2 write relevant phrases connected 你好！ 你 我家 。我的生日。我的家

to one another to structure a story 有 。 我的姐姐和我的妹妹和我的小
狗 。我喜欢吃 。

3 write a story with main 你好！ 你星期六来我家玩。星期六

characters, beginning, actions, 我的生日。我的家 有很多 。我们 和
things, and ending, or write a 我的姐姐和我的妹妹和我的小狗玩。
short paragraph fulfilling the 我们 吃。我喜欢 蛋糕。
real-world scenario task, but with
some words/characters/grammar
errors

4 write a story with main 你好！我想 (here should add请) 你星

characters, beginning, actions,
things, and ending, or write a
short paragraph fulfilling the
real-world scenario task, and only
have very subtle or no errors
期六来我家玩。(here would be better
to add 因为) 星期六是我的生日。我
的家里有很多玩具。我们可以和我的
姐姐和 (here should replace和 with
‘、’ ) 我的妹妹和我的小狗玩。我们 (
here would be better to add也) 可以吃
蛋糕。我喜欢草莓蛋糕。