How powerful are Chinese characters' effects on children's creativity?

Abstract

This paper conducts a preliminary evaluation of a learning strategy for Chinese native speakers to learn Chinese characters more effectively. The study utilizes a newly developed creative instruction approach called a Two-Stage learning Model (TSLM) and investigates its effects on students' verbal creativity and creative writing. The researchers developed this learning strategy based on children's self-generated stories, rhymes, and pictures of new Chinese characters they are learning. Learning in this manner is a natural approach because the Chinese people developed characters from drawings of natural objects, items from everyday life, and abstract concepts. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design with 54 participants (27 boys and 27 girls) in the 4th grade in an urban elementary school in Taiwan. The experimental group underwent TSLM instruction for eight weeks, and the control group received regular instruction. Participants were asked to use imagination and draw a character's picture, then explain their drawings by writing stories or making rhymes of the assigned characters. Three quantitative instruments were applied: New Creative Thinking Test (NCTT) for measuring divergent-thinking skills; Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) for evaluating creative products; and Chinese characters' recall test for assessing the number of characters recalled. Results indicated enhancement of three constructs of NCTT: fluency, flexibility, and originality. Moreover, they showed that children who underwent treatment scored higher on the creative writing tasks; the recall test results were insignificant suggesting that the difference between groups in creative performance was due to TSLM instruction. The study provides the first demonstration in real educational settings of how Chinese characters could promote verbal creativity.