A seminar entitled ‘improving children’s Chinese literacy performance by developing an educational computer game for training morphological skills‘ was held on 18 October 2019 at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). The seminar aimed at providing parents knowledge and strategies on improving the reading and writing abilities and promote our game-based literacy intervention project, which is funded by SCOLAR.
Reading and writing are two basic but important abilities for children to grasp. Problems in reading and writing will influence children’s academic performance across various subjects, their psychological status, and thus will affect their long-term development. A scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying reading and writing and relevant problems is critical for providing effective help to the children. At the same time, a research-based training programme is necessary.
During this two-hour seminar, the project team shared the basic knowledge of reading and writing, introduced the important skills for children to develop their literacy skills (i.e., morphological awareness), and then introduced the intervention game that aimed to improve children’s morphological awareness. In the second session of the seminar, Dr Zhengye Xu and Dr Li-Chih Wang were invited to give two presentations on their recent research findings on how to improve Chinese children’s literacy abilities. During the Q&A sessions, our team had very active discussions with the audiences.
