Learning Garden Experience Center

Center heads name, title and contact information：

Heads/ Co-heads from China：Danhua LIN, Professor, Vice Dean of school of psychology, BNU
Email：danhualin@bnu.edu.cn

Heads/Co-heads from Finland：Heikki Lyytinen, Professor, University of Jyväskylä
Email：heikki.j.lyytinen@jyu.fi
Jari Multisilta, Professor, Tampere University of Technology
Email： jari.multisilta@tut.fi

The collaboration between BNU and University of Jyväskylä (GraphoLearn group, see grapholearn.info) focusses on building a GL-based learning environment for Chinese children to learn Pinyin and next also Chinese characters. Everything GL group and colleagues in BNU plan to have is not only the R&D needed for implementing the Chinese content (which is huge task) but also validation of the efficacy of the result in helping children to acquire the basic reading skill.

The Pinyin version has already been developed and validated.The content creation for the next steps are under development. The last will be following the theoretical knowledge of professor Hua Shu and Hong Li who have been working to find an optimal way children could learn the demanding Chinese writing.

The key property of their theory is the central importance they give to the developmental readiness of the learners. This means that learning the basic steps of reading of Chinese characters can be started to be taken quite early. These BNU experts are empathetically supporting the preferences of many Chinese parents to introduce reading related information to their children years before they enter school to shorten their long travel to reach the final goal. Reading acquisition of Chinese contains storing of thousands of connections between spoken and written language and because GL technology is optimized for such a connection building this is a promising approach which, however, means years of work.