Y. Matsumoto et al. (Eds.): ICCPOL 2006, LNAI 4285, pp. 139 – 148, 2006. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

The Effects of Computer Assisted Instruction to Train People with Reading Disabilities Recognizing Chinese

Characters

Wan-Chih Sun1, Tsung-Ren Yang2, Chih-Chin Liang3, Ping-Yu Hsu3, and Yuh-Wei Kung4

1 Resource Room, Taipei Bo-Ai Elementary School, No.20, Lane 95, Songren Rd., Sinyi Disrict, Taipei City, Taiwan 110, R.O.C.

lgcwow@gmail.com

2 Department of Special Education, National Taipei University of Education, No.134, Sec. 2, Heping E. Rd., Da-an District, Taipei City, Taiwan 106, R.O.C.

try@tea.ntue.edu.tw 3 Department of Management, National Central University, No. 300, Jung-da Rd.,

Jung-li City, Taoyuan, Taiwan 320, R.O.C. {92441022, pyhsu}@mgt.ncu.edu.tw

4 Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Nanya Institute of Technology, No. 414, Sec. 3, Chung-Shan E. Rd., Jung-li City, Taoyuan, Taiwan 320, R.O.C.

parrot@nanya.edu.tw

Abstract. Chinese stem-deriving instruction has been proved to effectively help people with reading disabilities recognize Chinese characters. With the applica-tions and development of information technology, cybernetic Chinese stem-deriving instruction can help more people with reading disabilities learn Chinese characters and peruse articles more effectively. In this study, we develop computer-assisted instruction method for Chinese stem-deriving instruction and compare three teaching strategies. In this work, we recruit three elementary students with reading disabilities as participants, and evaluate the effectiveness of instructing with a proposed teaching strategy.

Keywords: Education, Reading Disabilities, Recognition of Chinese Characters, Interactive Learning Environment, Stem-Deriving Instruction.

1 Introduction

Common instructions used to recognize Chinese characters could be classified as two approaches: character-distributed instruction, and character-centralized instruction [1]. The character-distributed instruction means a student learns Chinese characters by reading the full text of an article. Whenever a student understands the content of the article, s/he recognizes the overall meaning of each sentence and then come to under-stand each character. A teacher makes students understand Chinese characters mainly

140 W.-C. Sun et al.

through this instruction [1]. In this case, a student can be instructed to understand the form, articulation, and the meaning of Chinese words. On the other hand, charac-ter-centralized instruction deploys the method to classify Chinese characters with the similar visual-orthographic and the same phonetic through which a student can memorize characters and to learn the words. Through Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruc-tion (CSDI), a student can easily associate an unfamiliar Chinese character by com-bining a familiar stem character (the equivalent with a “root” in English) with a radical or a component that is derived from the character-centralized instruction. However, to learn through CSDI, a student needs to recognize few basic Chinese characters [1].

The CSDI has also been proved very effective for students with reading disabilities to recognize Chinese characters [1]. Previous studies on CSDI have also showed that the character-centralized instruction is feasible for instructing student with poor short-term memory through the CSDI [2].

A previous study has proved the effectiveness of instructing students by the pro-posed computer-assisted application of the Computer-Assisted Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruction (C-CSDI) was as good as instructing students by the Chinese Stem-Derived Instruction taught by a teacher (T-CSDI) [3]. That is, the effectiveness of instructing through the C-CSDI and the T-CSDI is similar. In Addition, the costs for instruction can be reduced because students can be taught concurrently, and the instruction per-son-time can be reduced by adopting the computer-assisted instruction [4]. Although a teacher can control the emotion of a student and adjust the teaching strategy in time through the T-CSDI, one teacher would not be able to take care of many students with reading disabilities at the same time. Sometimes, students have difficulties in concen-trating on learning. Without sufficient involvement of teachers, adopting the computer-assisted instruction alone would not be able to ensure the effectiveness of multimedia learning. In order to make sure students with reading disabilities learn with attention, a teacher must be properly involved in a computerized instructional applica-tion. However, the role of a teacher must be clarified when students are learning through a computerized instructional tool in the classroom [5]. In this study, we pro-pose a teaching strategy: the Teacher Involved Computer-Assisted Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruction (TC-CSDI) to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction, discuss the human interaction design, and provide suggestions and teaching methods for further studies.

2 Background

2.1 People with Reading Disabilities and Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruction

Generally, the people with reading disabilities pay much time and attention on recog-nizing characters when reading an article [6]. They easily tend to fail to read and understand the article because they are busy in recognizing unfamiliar words and may not be able to understand the meaning and context of the article well [7]. The Chinese characters consist of different visual form and articulation. Word meanings are difficult to learn. Recently, the studies show the Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruction (CSDI), one of the character-centralized instructions, can be used to help people with reading disabilities recognize Chinese characters.

The Effects of Computer Assisted Instruction to Train People 141

Fig. 1 shows the conceptual diagram of CSDI. One stem character combines dif-ferent radical characters can help students understand unfamiliar characters. For ex-

ample, ” ” is composed of ” ” and ” ”. The Chinese character ” ” is a stem

character and ” ” is a radical character. CSDI, combining a stem character with a radical or a component, can be used to drive students to recognize unfamiliar characters through familiar characters [7]. Students can easily comprehend relationships among visual form, articulation, and word meanings of Chinese characters, which can be de-rived from one stem character combined with radical characters.

Fig. 1. The conceptual diagram of CSDI

2.2 Computer-Assisted Instruction

Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) is used as an instructional tool adopted to im-prove learning effectiveness, such as understanding form, articulation, and word meanings, in various areas. The instructional tool can provide immediate feedback, monitor individual learning performance, and help people study repeatedly. More-over, learning motivation can be maintained by the CAI effectiveness, especially for elementary students [1]. CAI can be a means of instruction for teachers to apply an effective teaching strategy by using computers, and using time and other resources wisely [5].

The teacher-involved model is very important for building up a computerized ap-plication [8]. The CAI is designed for students’ needs without teachers’ comments. However, the software affects designers, trainers (or teachers) and users (or students) in the software-developing process) [8].

142 W.-C. Sun et al.

Students with reading disabilities are unable to pay full attention to CAI without teachers’ reminders at all times. Therefore, to build up an application of C-CSDI, a teacher must participate in the whole process of developing software to ensure the application works to instruct students when the teacher is involved [3].

3 Research Method

In Taiwan, although students start learning Chinese characters at the first grade, CSDI cannot be used for instructing students at this grade level. The students must reach a basic level of word vocabulary before receiving CSDI, while first-grade students normally only recognize a few characters and therefore would not be qualified to be the participants in this research. In Taiwan, normal students usually recognize Chinese characters through the character-distributed instruction. Therefore, this study adopts students with learning disability as participants. In addition, a teacher of special edu-cation must teach students for at least one semester in order to diagnose the student with reading disabilities in Chinese characters [1]. Therefore, this work selects upper grade students from primary school with learning disabilities as the participants.

The single subject research shows the effectiveness of an instruction can be proved through three successful cases [4]. Therefore, to understand the effectiveness of three different types of CSDI, upper grade students with reading disabilities were chosen as participants. With a small group of students with reading disability, this study adopts single subject research method with an alternative treatments design in experiments to compare the instructing effectiveness with three teaching instruction types: T-CSDI, C-CSDI, and TC-CSDI. The results are presented as statistic analysis and visual analysis.

4 Research Design

This work adopts single subject research method and selects three participants from a pool of 12 students with reading disabilities in one school elementary school in Taipei, Taiwan [3]. These selected participants are qualified to be research subjects because of the following:

• their intelligence quotients are above 70, • the percentile of their scores in the Grade Chinese Characters Reading Test is

under 25 percentile, and • their reading disabilities are not caused by sensory deficit, emotional distur-

bance, cultural disadvantages, and inappropriate instructions [9],[10].

Table 1 shows the background information of the three student subjects in this study. This study adopts three instruction approaches: T-CSDI, C-CSDI, and TC-CSDI, to instruct the participants to lean Chinese characters 1. Each participant has been in-structed ten times with T-CSDI, C-CSDI, and TC-CSDI, respectively. The order of three instructions is randomly selected in each instructing session by playing a dice :

1 The detail design of the proposed cybernetic instructional tool has been described [3].

The Effects of Computer Assisted Instruction to Train People 143

number one and number two indicate a student must be instructed through T-CSDI, number three and number four through C-CSDI, and others through TC-CSDI. A teacher teaches each participant one session a day.

• Using T-CSDI, a teacher follows all instructing procedures, including oral introduction, pre-test, instruction, review, character game, and test. The phase of character game is used for consolidating effects of learning.

• Using C-CSDI, instruction procedure includes pre-test, instruction, review, and character game are operated through a computer. Moreover, the teacher operates the phase of test merely.

• Using TC-CSDI, a teacher introduces the completely instructing process including software instruction of TC-CSDI during the phase of oral intro-duction. The phases of pre-test, instruction review and character game are operated. A teacher assists participants during instruction and guides par-ticipants on the phase of character game in the original design.

Table 1. Participants’ profile

Participant A Participant B Participant C

Age Grade

8 3rd

8 3rd

8 3rd

Gender Girl Boy Boy

Verbal 92 89 95

Performance Scale 102 73 116

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III Full score 96 79 105

The Grade Chinese Characters Reading Raw Test /Percentile Rank

49/24 22/2 36/8

First, a pilot test was carried to test the feasibility of the instruction approaches. We

found that a teacher could not interrupt the thinking process of participants on the phase of computer instruction from the pilot study. The flow theory shows whenever a person is using a computer, the person might be in the flow experience and the learning effects are reduced if a teacher interrupts those using computer [11]. Therefore, this work suggested that a teacher focus on the first phase of oral introduction to attract partici-pants and the phase of character game in order to reinforce the memory of instructed Chinese characters.

Fig. 2 shows the proposed design of the TC-CSDI. The dotted arrow “assist” means a teacher does not interrupt the teaching process through computer and only assists users when necessary. For example, helping poor readers focus on learning when they are

144 W.-C. Sun et al.

distracted, providing more examples to illustrate the relationship clearly between stems and radicals, and answering students’ questions when the teacher adopts TC-CSDI in this study. That is, a teacher helps a participant only when any participant has problem in TC-CSDI.

Fig. 2. The Design of the TC-CSDI

Table 2. The Selected Set of Chinese Characters

T-CSDI C-CSDI TC-CSDI

The Effects of Computer Assisted Instruction to Train People 145

The learning of recognizing characters is unreversed. That is, the effect of recog-nizing a character through instructing one time is the same as instructing many times. Each set of Chinese characters is only adopted to one instruction once, whenever a set is used to instruct one participant. No matter which instruction is selected, the participant must study another set of Chinese characters. This study selects 30 sets of character through a test of 36 characters used to test 40 students without learning disabilities [5]. Table 2 shows the selected sets of Chinese characters.

5 Results

The learning effectiveness of each teaching strategy, T-CSDI, C-CSDI, and TC-CSDI, of each participant is analyzed by applying statistic analysis and visual analysis. Table 3 presents the average result of ten-time instruction with T-CSDI, C-CSDI, and TC-CSDI.

The average results indicate that the effectiveness of adopting TC-CSDI is better than C-CSDI, which in turn is better than T-CSDI. Whereas, a previous study shows that the effectiveness of T-CSDI and C-CSDI is not significantly different [3]. The experimental results of previous study and this study are different.

Table 3 shows that participant B performs worst among three participants on intel-ligence quotients and percentile of the result of the graded Chinese Characters Reading Test. Additionally, participant C is the best one. The instructing result of participant A shows 5.5 points gain (about 0.3 times of standard deviation of C-CSDI) from adopting C-CSDI to adopting TC-CSDI. The result of participant B increases 9.38 points (0.34 times of standard deviation of C-CSDI) from adopting C-CSDI to adopting TC-CSDI. The result of participant C is increased 0.5 points (0.03 times of standard deviation of C-CSDI) from adopting C-CSDI to adopting TC-CSDI. Hence, the rising trend seems to imply that the TC-CSDI might be efficient if a participant is a poorer reader. That is, whenever a teacher assists the poorer reader, the improvement is greater than a better reader.

Table 3. The average results of participants

Participant T-CSDI C-CSDI TC-CSDI Standard Deviation

Of C-CSDI

A 74.50 91.00 96.50 18.55

B 65.25 74.95 84.33 27.59

C 84.00 91.75 92.25 18.64

Average 74.58 85.90 91.03

146 W.-C. Sun et al.

Fig. 3 shows the result of instructing participant A in each test. However, the visual analysis shows the results of adopting TC-CSDI are within top 20% and the results of adopting T-CSDI grows up stably. The variation of the results of C-CSDI is large. On average, the teacher helps participant A three times during the process of TC-CSDI. The fifth test through C-CSDI shows a different result from the ones of other two in-structions. It should be caused by an emotional problem: participant A was distracted by computer games he just had played and the C-CSDI was the first adopted instruction at that time.

0

20

40

60

80

100

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Sequence

(%)

T-CSDI

C-CSDI

TC-CSDI

Fig. 3. Result of instructing participant A in each test

0

20

40

60

80

100

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Sequence

(%)

T-CSDI

C-CSDI

TC-CSDI

Fig. 4. Result of instructing participant B in each test

The Effects of Computer Assisted Instruction to Train People 147

Fig. 4 shows the beginning results of participant B are not good, because participant B is not familiar with these instructions at the beginning from observation. However, participant B is familiar with the TC-CSDI in the fifth test, so the results of adopting TC-CSDI are shown 100% since the fifth test. The variation of the results of C-CSDI is large. The results of T-CSDI descend from 100% to almost 40% at the sixth test, be-cause the participant is eager to be instructed by C-CSDI or TC-CSDI at that time. In average, the teacher helps participant B seven times during the process of TC-CSDI.

Fig. 5 shows the result of instructing participant C in each test. The results of T-CSDI, C-CSDI and TC-CSDI are similar. However, the results of TC-CSDI are within top 20%. In average, the teacher helps participant C one time during the process of TC-CSDI.

0

20

40

60

80

100

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Sequence

(%)

T-CSDI

C-CSDI

TC-CSDI

Fig. 5. Result of instructing participant C in each test

Therefore, for these participants, adopting TC-CSDI exhibited higher scores from CSDI than using T-CSDI and C-CSDI.

6 Conclusion and Recommendations

In the past, no proper computer system could assist a teacher to help people with reading disabilities recognize Chinese characters. In this study, we apply computer multimedia to help teachers instruct people with reading disabilities, and compare the difference in effectiveness of three instruction methods.

This study proposes a novel instruction, Teacher-Involved Computer-Assisted Chi-nese Stem-Deriving Instruction (TC-CSDI), to build up a multimedia application for people with reading disabilities for learning Chinese characters. Finally, this work found the effects of instructing through TC-CSDI for the participant B is better than other participants are. The improved effects of participant B is 0.34 times of standard deviation of C-CSDI from adopting C-CSDI to TC-CSDI that is greater than the

148 W.-C. Sun et al.

improved results of participant A and participant C. Additionally, the IQ and initial reading ability of participant B is the lowest and participant B is easy to be distracted. He needs the teacher’s assistance to concentrate on the instructional application. However, the result of adopting TC-CSDI to teach participant B is better than to teach participant A and participant C. We believe that the poorer reader needs teacher’s guidance when using computer instruction software, and nevertheless, it needs to be studied in further researches. This work also suggests a proper role of a teacher within the process of instructing students with TC-CSDI.

This and previous works adopt single subject experiments. As the results of both works, to instruct a student through a computer only is not worse than through a teacher. However, we cannot draw a general conclusion that is statistically sound due to the small sample size that we have. Therefore, we recommend that following: 1) enlarge the sample size to test and validate the effectiveness of TC-CSDI. 2) Although the selected participants are with reading disabilities, teaching people with typical reading ability through TC-CSDI would be interesting and warrant further study. 3) Further study would be needed to determine if TC-CSDI could be feasible for people whose native language is not Chinese.

References

1. Hall, T.E., Hughes, C.A., Filbert, M.: Computer assisted instruction in reading for students with learning disabilities：A research synthesis. Ed Treat Child, 23 (2000) 173-193.

2. Lu, M.C.: The Effectiveness of Chinese Stem-Deriving Instruction on Elementary Students with Severely Word-Recognition Difficulties. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan (1995).

3. Sun, W. C., Yang, T. R., Liang, C. C., Hsu, P. Y.: Developing a computer-assisted program on Chinese stem-deriving instruction: a pilot study. Spec Ed Q, 90 (2004) 13-18.

4. Teng, H. Y.: The study of CAI in functional vocabulary learning for elementary school Students with moderate mental retardation. National Hualien Teachers College, Taipei, Taiwan (2002).

5. Huang, D.H.: The Study on Improving the Word-Recognition Learning of Elementary Students with Severely Word-Recognition Difficulties. National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan (2003).

6. McArthur, G.M., Hogben, J.H., Edwards, V.T., Heath, S.M., Mengler, E.D.:On the “Spe-cifics” of Specific Reading Disability and Specific Language Impairment. J Child Psy-chology and Psychiatry Allied Discipline, 41 (2000) 869-874.

7. Liu, C. Y.: A Integrated Analysis of the Effects of Word Recognition Teaching. J Secon Ed, 9 (2002) 121-152.

8. Hinostroza, J.E., Mellar, H.G.: Pedagogy embedded in educational software design: report of a case study. Comput Ed, 37 (2001) 27-40.

9. McCandliss, B.D., Noble, K.G.: The development of reading impairment: A cognitive neurosience model. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 9 (2003) 196-205.

10. Wu, Y.C.: A Study of Family Surrounding Factors as Related to Children’s Reading Abili-ties. Bulletin of Edu Psyc, 34 (2002) 1-19.

11. Novak, T.P., Hoffman, D.L., Duhachek, A.: The Influence of Goal-Directed and Experien-tial Activities on Online Flow Experiences. J Consum Psyc, 13 (2003) 3-16.