This is the second post of a three-part series on the common problems primary school students face when learning Chinese. In this post, we examine how to encourage students to revise Chinese.
In our previous post, we talked about how most of the common problems students faced stem from vocabulary, and the importance of regular revision to “beat” the Forgetting Curve. The million dollar question is “yes, but how do I get my child to revise?”
Three pronged revision approach
While every child is different, something that has worked for many of our students is a three pronged approach towards making revision easier, more bite-size and more game-like.
Make revision easier
The first tip comes from our star teacher Hong Mei lao shi: “many students don’t want to revise because they find it hard. A simple yet effective method is to get students to first read the textbook before doing their homework, and to do the revision/homework as soon as possible. Reading the textbook and practising sentences builds vocabulary, which is the foundation for composition writing in the future.”
If you are going “duh, that’s obvious” right now, hear us out.
The last thing most kids want to do after coming home from class is to immediately do their homework or revision. However, the longer they put it off, the more difficult it will be. Consider the Forgetting Curve below – when we learn something new, we forget half of it within a day, and almost everything within a week. So the longer your child puts off revision/homework, the more he or she has forgotten, which makes revision more painful.
And when students do start revising, it’s quite common to jump immediately to the questions and call their parents for help if they get stuck. This is bad for two reasons – a) it does not train their self-reliance, which is important as students go into Upper Primary, and b) it’s annoying for us parents too if we are being honest.
Instead, get your children in the habit of first reading the textbook, especially if more than 1 day has elapsed since class. New content is most easily forgotten, and revising the textbook first will make doing the questions easier. The easier revision becomes, the more likely our children will revise regularly.
????Pro Tip: To really consolidate the content, get your child to read the textbook aloud rather than silently. The act of reading and saying text aloud is more effective in remembering than silent reading.
Make revision bite-sized
One of the most famous Japanese business philosophies is Kaizen (改善), famously used by Toyoya to grow from a small division to the second largest automobile company in the world. Kaizen means Continuous Improvement, across all levels, in a gradual and methodical process.
You might be wondering what has Kaizen got to do with learning Chinese.
One of my favourite books is The Spirit of Kaizen, which talks about how we can use Kaizen to improve our personal lives. When trying to improve ourselves or our children, we tend to gravitate towards drastic actions like “I’m going to get my child to revise 2 hours of Chinese everyday” or “I’m only going to speak Chinese to my child”.
However, most parents who have tried the above revert back to old routines pretty quickly. This is because our brain is hardwired to reject revolutionary changes.
The key to creating lasting change is to instead take small incremental steps. When our children equate revision sessions to long 1-hour affairs, they are likely to procrastinate and reject it. However, if sessions are a minimum of just 5-10 minutes, they are more likely to revise since it’s so short. And once they start, they are likely to continue for much longer than 5-10 minutes.
????Pro Tip: We learn much more effectively doing regular bite-sized revisions compared to irregular cramming sessions.
I’m applying the same techniques to learn Artificial Intelligence. The last thing I want to do after a long day of work is to decipher complex Math equations used in AI, but I commit to a minimum of just 5 minutes of practise, which usually ends up becoming an hour.
Make revision game-like
As someone who used to hate Chinese, I totally get why many kids find revising Chinese painful and boring – assessment books are dry and provide zero feedback, and it’s just a slog.
But consider a similar case study: Math. Interestingly, many parents tell us their kids love doing questions on sites like Koobits even though they normally don’t like Math. It’s the same story in North America, where Prodigy helps hundreds of millions of users revise Math through games.
But why do these same students not like to revise Chinese on e-learning sites? Our hypothesis is that many Singaporean students dislike Chinese more than Math and most Chinese e-learning systems are just not engaging enough to overcome this dislike of Chinese.
We spent the last two years testing this hypothesis, and after many different attempts, we found the most success with a pet collection game. Your child becomes a pet collector, and captures cute pets by answering Chinese questions correctly. This motivates your child to revise Chinese, as the more questions he or she answers, the more pets captured.
While we still have a long way to go, the initial results are encouraging – more than 1m questions have been answered on our platform, and students who regularly use our portal see an 80+% improvement.
We provide 7-day free trials of our portal, and if you are interested, just click on this link.
SUMMARY
As we mentioned in our previous post, building a strong foundation in vocabulary is critical to long-term success in Chinese. Vocabulary issues naturally trickle down to composition and comprehension; and many kids who don’t like learning Chinese do so because trying to read and write a language where they don’t know many words is tedious.
Try out the above three revision strategies to build a strong vocabulary foundation, and we are sure it will help your child improve in Chinese!
Lastly, KidStartNow runs a Chinese enrichment centre at Bedok, and if you are looking for help with Chinese, please also leave your details below and we will contact you within two working days.
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