Hand Writing Characters: Learning from Evon Xu's Approach

Hand Writing Characters: Learning from Evon Xu's Approach

This is Diane Neubauer, 杜雁子. Some years ago (2017 or 2018!) I heard Evon Xu, a Chinese language teacher in Washington in the US northwest, talk about how she had developed an approach to handwriting characters based on student feedback. I later interviewed Evon to get more details about her approach, and am now writing about what I learned from her, with her permission.

First off though -- in this post about handwriting Chinese characters, I do not mean to suggest that it is necessarily preferable or efficient to *base* reading, character learning, or writing and composing on handwritten character knowledge. I am not suggesting any of that. I do not do much handwriting with my students, and have permitted them to use reminder sheets when they need to hand write characters. Teaching online now, I do even less than when I taught in K12 schools.

And, as an important consideration, there is research on the advantages of a typing-based character learning approach as compared to writing characters by hand. In the future, I hope to write more about what I've recently been learning from work by Dr. Phyllis Zhang. I think there is also a great deal of benefit from basing a Chinese program on considerable exposure to characters through highly comprehensible reading, linked to and building on students' aural comprehension, as a main means for students to learn characters. I see potential for typing as an assessment and assurance to students that they do know characters from all that exposure, connected to their listening comprehension and phrasing.

That said, there are situations in which teachers may have a goal for students to develop some level of handwriting skills in Chinese characters. Some reasons I can think of:

Handwriting characters is a cultural practice that allows students to experience Chinese culture.
Some students take Chinese in part because they are drawn to the beauty of Chinese characters, and being able to hand write some gives a sense of personal accomplishment. (Of course, other students may feel quite differently, but some certainly do enjoy character writing.)
Some programs end with the IB (International Baccalaureate) test, which at present still includes essay writing by hand in Chinese characters. I do not think this is preferable as a format for exams, and I hope that IB updates this. However, if a school is committed to the IB program and IB testing, hand writing Chinese characters is going to be much more important from the beginning.

Xu Laoshi's approach developed for the first two reasons. For her Chinese language program, hand writing characters was important culturally and as a skill of its own. Yet, traditional approaches to hand writing instruction were burdensome for students. Here is, in brief, how she resolved these competing forces:

When she began working at her school years ago, she inherited the previous teacher's practice of a character handwriting quiz each Friday, from memory, with students doing 听写 (dictation) of characters they were studying that week. She saw that the Chinese program was fairly small, and was concerned that some students were discouraged and dropping or just not taking Chinese courses. She asked her students for their perspective about what was discouraging and difficult, and they pointed to those weekly character dictation quizzes as a stressful burden.

She valued hand writing, though, and eventually developed a successful approach:

Each semester, she gave a goal number of characters for students to learn to write by hand. I believe it was 75 in semester 1 of Chinese 1 (high school year one learning Chinese), and 150 characters at the end of Chinese 1.
She did not mandate which characters they had to learn to write. Students chose from words they knew from class.
She gave regular, brief time to write during classes. No weekly quizzes, just time to write. She would browse around the classroom while students wrote, commenting on what she saw. I can't recall now if they always wrote on paper or also on small whiteboards. I also don't recall how much direct instruction about hand writing she did, but it might have been just at the beginning of Chinese 1. I don't think that stroke order and stroke direction was emphasized as much as making the characters legible to others.
She ensured that students knew how the characters they wrote sounded, and what they meant. This meant that students could write out sentences of their own creation as they worked on their hand writing skills. Meaning of words and characters and familiar use of those words was part of her approach, rather than simply writing characters ten times each without any context.

These few minutes of class time continued throughout the school year, leading up to semester exams in which character hand writing was part of the exam. Before then, there were no quizzes or testing other than the informal, formative assessment she gave by observing the students as they wrote by hand.

On semester exams, she gave students a sheet with boxes enough to hand write characters they knew. What she found was that rather than hitting the minimum number of characters, students very often exceeded the required number. That was not something that happened in weekly character memorization quizzes!

So, if you are evaluating ways in which to include hand writing of Chinese characters, I recommend considering Xu Laoshi's approach. It involves student choice, low stress opportunities to write and get feedback, and cumulative progress that students can see and measure.

A final point. We live in a highly technical world in which calm and quiet can be hard to find. For some, myself included, hand writing in Chinese characters (and English!) is part of my journaling and planning practices because it is an opportunity to be calm and in the moment. I have also seen a number of videos of character handwriting as a type of therapeutic sound and action (ASMR). This ability to find calm is a nice benefit to hand writing, and though it is not a major goal for me when I teach Chinese, it has value to me.

Hand Writing Characters: Learning from Evon Xu's Approach

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