Stress on writing hinders reading

Kindergartens put too much emphasis on writing when they teach Chinese characters, leading to mediocre results in the more important skill of reading, a study has found.

University of Hong Kong researchers said children should learn to recognise characters before they learned to write them, which would help them with their reading at an earlier stage.

Study leader Professor Tse Shek-kam suggested that the Education Bureau design a new syllabus for teaching Chinese characters and provide more training for teachers.

'Many teachers think knowing how to write Chinese characters is the first step to knowing Chinese characters in general. That's wrong. It's only that characters that have more strokes are harder to write. It doesn't mean they are harder to recognise,' he said. 'In fact ... many characters with fewer strokes have meanings that are more complex and harder for schoolchildren to grasp.'

The study also found that despite growing numbers of non-Chinese minorities enrolling in local kindergartens - seen as an effort to give them language skills that would bring better opportunities later in life - they still fell behind in Chinese because the language was not used at home.

The project, paid for by the government's Quality Education Fund, was conducted in July to assess the standard of learning and teaching Chinese characters across the city's kindergartens.