| Author: | Li, Yanlin |
| Title: | Building a cross-linguistic lexical KnowledgeNet to facilitate ubiquitous learning for IB PYP L2 learners of Chinese |
| Advisors: | Huang, Chu-ren (CBS) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Subject: | Chinese language -- Study and teaching (Primary) -- English speakers Chinese language -- Study and teaching International baccalaureate Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | xiii, 156 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Teaching and learning Chinese as a second language in the English medium learning environment is often challenged by heterogeneous backgrounds of the students, such as in Hong Kong’s international schools. Due to the limited in-school time for Chinese classes and the inquiry-based curriculum, tailoring the learning programme according to the language levels of the students faces many challenges in meeting their needs. This thesis aims to explore information from cross-linguistic knowledge resources based on a fine-grained ontological system and synergize a linguistic KnowledgeNet. The KnowledgeNet is adapted for IB PYP (The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme) L2 learners of Chinese in Hong Kong’s international schools to design an embodied cognition based learning programme focusing on embodied concepts. Based on this rationale, this study builds a basic architecture and mechanism of the cross-linguistic ontological system according to the frameworks of Sinica BOW, an existing fine-grained ontological system linking animal concepts to SUMO nodes. Following the guidelines, a small bilingual domain ontology is constructed with the essential animal noun lexicons extracted from a cartoon subtitles corpus. Furthermore, a diachronic comparison is conducted between the newly built modern bilingual cartoon domain ontology and the Sinica BOW Tang 300 Poems domain ontology. The comparison of the two domain ontologies brings educators with some new perspectives on applying corpus linguistics approaches to Chinese second language teaching. The study also extracts the associated sensory lexicons clustering around the animal nouns from the domain ontology. The finding reveals the typical properties of animal-related sensory adjectives and the event knowledge of animal-related sensory verbs. In addition, the finding shows that the special use of animal characters as personas in cartoons models how young learners could understand and express more abstract feelings. Last but not least, the findings lead to a discussion on how the cross-linguistic KnowledgeNet aligns with the IB (International Baccalaureate) curriculum standards adopted by most of Hong Kong’s international schools. Firstly, the IB system focuses on conceptual understanding, whereas extracting language concepts and semantic associates as well as mapping the concepts from English to Chinese could help students construct in-depth understanding on their own. Secondly, the IB curriculum encourages students to process new information by making connections to real-life experiences and the world around them. Thus, animal domain ontologies could be a good start for young learners to explore and understand the ecological system around them and be able to have empathy for the environment. Furthermore, IB education emphasizes an inquiry-based approach, with effective teamwork and collaboration. Such an approach is typically learner-oriented and issue-oriented, which is not organized by subjects or disciplines. Hence, traditional Chinese textbooks are not suitable for integration. Ontology will allow linguistic terms to be easily linked more to each unit of inquiry regarding its knowledge. It is hoped that the method of constructing a multilingual knowledge web could be generalized to cover a larger size of language data for developing question-and-answer systems or more interactive learning systems to facilitate ubiquitous learning for L2 Chinese learners. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7136.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 2.35 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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