Faculty of Education - Theses

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Subject: Study and teaching (Secondary) × Type: Masters Coursework thesis × Start date: 2000 × End date: 2008 × Author: Kandori, Shizuka ×

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    The influence of information and communication technology (ICT) on secondary school students' development in Japanese handwriting skills
    Kandori, Shizuka ( 2008)
    For twenty years, researchers have suggested that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilitates language learning by motivating students (e.g. Rodrigues and Rodrigues, 1986; Phinney, 1989; Pennington and Brock, 1992; Felix 2001). In particular, research concludes that ICT positively changes students' attitudes towards writing, because it reduces the fear of making mistakes. Despite considerable research on the value of ICT in the learning of European languages and ESL, few studies have been conducted on its use in Japanese classes (Chikamatsu, 2003), especially at the early secondary level. Yet it is often said that Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English native speakers to learn (Chikamatsu, 2003), and its writing system is regarded as the most complex in the world (Sproat, 2000). Hence ICT might be expected to facilitate learning the three different sets of symbols used in combination to write Japanese, but it is not commonly used by secondary students for this. In this study, the aim was to document and analyse the achievements of beginner level school learners of Japanese when ICT was introduced for learning basic Japanese using mainly the phonetic Hiragana syllabary. Following methods created by Chikamatsu (2003), the effectiveness of using ICT was determined by comparing the speed and accuracy of students' answers in vocabulary tests, and interviewing them about their learning processes using ICT. The results show that, while the use of ICT motivated students' learning and assisted the weaker students to speed up their writing and to write more correctly, the excessive use of ICT had a negative influence on students' handwriting skills, an ability required in final year examinations as well as in real life. Thus students in the experimental group who used only the computer produced more errors when transferring to writing Japanese by hand. Findings therefore suggest that computers should only be used as a supplementary tool in class to stimulate students' learning.