Wed-based Chinese Character Recognition Assessment and Its Application on Distance Education of Chinese

The study aims at establishing an efficient, valid, and computerized Chinese character recognition assessment in order to meet the increasing needs for online tests in distance education of Chinese. We constructed a Web-based Chinese Character Recognition Assessment system, compiling a test for Chinese Character Recognition Test which included 120 characters from different levels of character frequency in this system. The duration of the assessment was eight minutes. The participants were asked to report the pronunciations of each character that were shown on the screen one at a time. One-week test-retest reliability showed a strong positive correlation, and Cronbach’s Alpha and the split-half reliability demonstrated that this assessment items have good internal consistency. Moreover, a criterion-related validity estimator revealed that the scores of this assessment had significantly positive correlations with three criterions: Graded Chinese Character Recognition Test (Huang, 2001), Tests of Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing (Extension school of Continuing Education of National Taiwan Normal University, 2010), and the three groups of different levels of CEFR (below A1, A1, A2 and above). The results suggest that this online character recognition assessment is valid to evaluate overall Chinese language skills. Moreover, the assessment in this study contains two scoring methods: Tone scoring and non-tone scoring. The results indicate that the tone scoring method already possesses the function of distinguishing the level of students’ Chinese competence (because the score for the character recognition test has a significantly positive correlation with the scores for listening, speaking, reading, and writing tests), and if the non-tone scoring method is adopted (i.e. taking no account of the correctness of tone), the discrimination of items and the validity of testing scores would be enhanced. Theoretically, this study supports that character-level knowledge is one of crucial components of Chinese language knowledge. Practically, this online character recognition assessment is an efficient and valid tool to evaluate the general Chinese ability of those who take Chinese as a second/foreign language.