Academic Background of Lam, Ho Cheong, PhD

Lam, Ho Cheong 林浩昌
Email: hclam@hkucs.org
Phone: (852) 9751-0541

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education, the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Born in Hong Kong, I grew up in Wah Fu Estate. My academic qualification includes a fair mix of two disciplines - Education and Computer Science. I graduated in 1991 with first class honors in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong, awarded with the Hong Kong University Alumni Prize. I then received an M.Phil. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I was bestowed a certificate of merit of excellent teaching. Then, for eight years, I had been working for the Faculty of Education in HKU and meanwhile I completed a Master of Education awarded with distinction. I then quitted the job and studied full time for my PhD on my favorite area of children's learning of Chinese characters, for which I received the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund Fellowship for Postgraduate Research Students and Award for Outstanding Research Postgraduate Student.

林浩昌，現任香港教育學院幼兒教育學系助理教授。生於中國香港，在華富�h長大。曾接受兩個學科的訓練：教育與電腦。一九九一年香港大學電子計算機科學系甲級榮譽學士畢業，獲香港大學校友奬；香港中文大學哲學碩士，獲優秀助教教學；曾八年任職於香港大學教育學院；兼讀教育碩士，獲優異成績；及後攻讀全日制哲學博士學位，研究兒童漢字學習，獲尤德爵士紀念基金研究生獎學金，以及傑出研究生奬。主要研究範圍包括：漢字學習、教學軟件設計、教師資源網絡。

More specifically, my expertise centers on the following three areas (Full list of publication):

Learning Chinese Characters. My PhD draws on Ference Marton's theory of variation to investigate children's learning of Chinese characters. I believe that of crucial importance is to what extent children can make sense of the composition of the characters holistically (I refer this as orthographic awareness), i.e. why a character is made up of its components in the way it is. My experiments lend support to the theory in explaining what makes an effective teaching of the characters. Besides this, My research interest also extends to investigating the difference among different learners of Chinese characters, including Chinese-speaking, South Asian and pre-school children. Furthermore, I also have great fond of learning other Asian languages, including Japanese and Korean.

Lam, H.C. (2008), An Exploratory Study of the Various Ways that Children Read and Write Unknown Chinese Characters, Journal of Basic Education, 17(1), 73-97.
Lam, H.C. (unpublished),. Orthographic Awareness in Learning Chinese Characters. Ph.D. Thesis, supervised by Prof. Tsui, Bik May Amy, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Sept 2006.

Designing Software for Learning. My believe is that the design of instructional software should take into account children's experience in learning specific content such as what kinds of errors children commonly make in learning such content. Effective instructional software should then focus the attention of the children exactly, i.e. no more and no less, on the important variations in learning the content (I call this variation affordance). Putting this into practice, since the widely-distributed shareware Han 漢 in 1991, I have over a decade of experience, especially from the Dragonwise Projects 現龍系列, in designing and developing software for children to learn Chinese characters, which are now well received by the primary school teachers in Hong Kong.

Lam, H.C., Ki, W.W., Chung, A.L.S., Ko, P.Y., Lai, A.C.Y., Lai, S.M.S., Chou, P.W.Y. & Lau, E.C.C. (2004), Designing learning objects that afford learners the experience of important variations in Chinese characters, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20(2), 114-123.
Lam, H.C., Ki, W.W., Law, N., Chung, A.L.S., Ko, P.Y., Ho, A.H.S. & Pun, S.W. (2001). Designing CALL for learning Chinese characters. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17, 115-128.
Lam, H.C., Ki, W.W., Chung, A.L.S. & Ko, P.Y. (2000). Experience in Designing Databases for Learning Chinese Characters. International Journal of Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, 13(4), 351-375.
Lam, H.C., Pun, K.H., Leung, S.T., Tse, S.K. and Ki, W.W. (1993). Computer-Assisted-Learning for Learning Chinese Characters. Communications of COLIPS: An International Journal of Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society, 3(1), 31-44.

Teacher Resource Network. I believe that teachers' understandings of the purposes of using teacher network mainly are to find ready-to-use teaching resources and to look for opportunities to professional development. For five years, I have been involved in the development of the CMI network 母語教學教師支援網站, which supports school teachers in Hong Kong to teach various subjects using Chinese as the medium of instruction. Besides this, I have also served the HKU Computer Science Alumni Association from 2001 to 2003 in building up a community of alumni.

Lam, H.C. (unpublished). Studying Teachers' Sense of Purpose of Using Teacher Resource Networks and Its Implication on Network Development. Master of Education Thesis, supervised by Ki, Wing Wah, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Nov 2001.
Ki, W.W., Tse, S.K., Shum, M.S.K. & Lam, H.C. (2003). The Introduction of a Computerised Network to Support Educational Change in Hong Kong. Education and Information Technologies, 8(2), 147-164.