Using Effective E-learning Pedagogy to Support Students with Diverse Cultural Backgrounds to Learn Chinese History: Academic performance and motivation
Submitted by:
Jessica M.Y. Young
Abstract:
The Hong Kong Government announced in 2017 that Chinese History became an independent compulsory subject for junior secondary level students. Some local schools arrange Chinese-speaking and non-native Chinese speaking (NCS) students in the same class. To cater for the needs of all students, e-learning pedagogy we depended heavily on during the epidemic outbreak remains to be a popular pedagogy for such purpose.
Among previous literature, although there are studies looking into how the use of e-learning facilitates students’ learning of different subjects (e.g. Wang et al., 2021), little research focuses on the effectiveness of e-learning on students with mixed-L1 studying with Chinese as the medium of instruction in the Hong Kong context.
In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of the use of e-learning platform designed by the research team (Loh et al., 2019), on students with mixed-L1 learning Chinese History in two aspects, their academic performance and learning motivation.
Based on Shum’s (2010) functional linguistics framework, analysis was conducted both qualitatively and quantitively on the students’ academic performance on three levels – from the word level, to the sentence level and the whole text level; meanwhile, interviews and questionnaires were adopted for comparing the learning motivation of the students before and after the study with reference to Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (2004). Through the 1-year study, results show that, the positive effect was found on both students’ academic results and their learning motivation, providing strong evidence that e-learning effectively helped students with diverse cultural backgrounds studying in the mixed-L1 Hong Kong context where Chinese is the medium of instruction.
Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2004). Handbook of self-determination research. University of Rochester Press.
Loh, E.K.Y., Sun, K.W., Ki, W.W., & Lau, K.C. (2018). The building and sharing of knowledge: Mobile app assists students of ethnic minorities to learn Chinese writing. The International Chinese Practical Writing Research Symposium. University of Macao.
Shum, M.S.K. (2010). The functions of language and the teaching of Chinese(2nd ed.). Hong Kong University Press.
Wang, C.Y., Zhang, Y.Y., & Chen, S.H. (2021). The Empirical Study of College Students’ E-Learning Effectiveness and Its Antecedents Toward the COVID-19 Epidemic Environment. Front. Psychol. 12:573590. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.573590