Event

In the past decade an explosion of digital devices and technological innovations have virtually revolutionized the study of Chinese language and Chinese script. These include tools such as comprehensive digital dictionaries (such as Pleco), hand-held multilingual dictionaries and translation devices, a plethora of online translation tools, hundreds of Hanzi-to-pinyin conversion tools, various optical character recognition (OCR) programs, text-to-speech converters, and a dazzling selection of pedagogical software (such as Wenlin), databases, and digital tools that can translate, annotate, gloss, format, read, write, speak and explain Chinese texts in various fashions and to varying degrees of sophistication. These tools, easily installed on smart phones and pads, allow beginning and intermediate students to easily navigate a vast range of texts that would have been nearly impossible a decade ago. Thus these digital tools clearly have the potential to utterly revolutionize the teaching of Chinese at all levels. Yet many students fail to make full use of such aids, and a great many Chinese teachers have not been able to incorporate these tools into the standard curriculum. These new aids important implications for the learning of Chinese characters in particular, and have prompted a reevaluation of the importance of written character memorization (e.g. daily tingxie exercises). Since even native Chinese speakers are losing the ability to produce characters by hand, to what extent is writing still a basic skill? What are the cognitive and psycholinguistic implications of these new methods of processing Chinese script? How can we teach students to make better use of these tools? How many of these digital aids are truly useful, and how many are merely distracting and counterproductive?
* CEAS Humanities Colloquium Series, cosponsored with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures