Letters | What Hong Kong educators can learn from the pandemic

Readers discuss focusing on student abilities and learning barriers for better educational outcomes, promoting tourism, and access around the Frontier Closed Area

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Children take part in a Chinese calligraphy event on July 9. A new study suggests that difficulties in reading and writing traditional Chinese characters operate on different principles. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 11:30am, 2 Aug 2023

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While the negative effects of Covid-19 have dominated headlines in Hong Kong in recent years, the pandemic may also have pointed a way for education to change positively.

Many will remember how quickly the classroom was brought into living rooms as teachers navigated the education of students from behind laptops. It was an opportunity for teachers to rethink lesson delivery, tailor instruction to students’ specific skills and consider barriers to learning in ways they might not have before.

And such consideration of student abilities and learning obstacles should take root even as Covid-19 recedes from our everyday lives. Take the case of children learning to read traditional Chinese characters.

Chinese literacy remains a difficult enterprise, and identifying the necessary skills involved is critical to success. With this in mind, our team at Chinese University recently conducted a study of the complexity of Chinese characters and potential skills needed to overcome the difficulty of reading and writing them.

The results showed that complex characters were associated with difficulties in reading for native speakers of Chinese, specifically those in primary school. While no one on our team was particularly floored by this finding, we were surprised to find that complexity had only a limited impact on writing. This may suggest that difficulties in reading and writing traditional Chinese characters operate on different principles.