Data analysis

University Degree Education and Teaching

Data analysis

Questionnaire

54 online-questionnaires were successfully collected from UG students of all schools in HKUST. Most of them are Year 2 students. Almost 60% of the respondents were belonged to the School of Science and nearly a quarter of respondents were belonged to the School of Engineering.

More than 60% of the respondents admitted that their Chinese abilities have been degraded after entering the university. Among these students, more than 70% believed that their Chinese abilities are deduced by 1-2 degree(s). 20% of them even graded their Chinese abilities by 3-4 degrees deterioration. There is such a huge students who thought that their Chinese abilities were deteriorating, it probably due to the fact that students in the School of Science and in the School of Engineering have been given less opportunities to study in the Chinese medium whereas students in the School of Business and Management are provided with them Putongwah lessons in their curriculums. Therefore, it is not difficult to explain why there are still a number of respondents (nearly 40%) who declared that they have improvement in their Chinese abilities and almost 90% of these students even said that they have 1-2 degree(s) enhancement in Chinese abilities after entering the university.

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Although our finding shows nearly 40% of respondents have improvement in their Chinese abilities, there is a general commitment that a Chinese Language course should be launched. Almost 80% of the respondent agreed that there should be a Chinese Language course. The reason behind might due to the fact that more than 63% of the respondents have taken 1-3 courses which are conducted in Chinese medium (including using Chinese during examinations) and nearly a quarter of respondents even have taken 4-6 Chinese-medium related courses. Since most of the Chinese-medium related courses launched by HKUST require students to work on their assignments and present their works in Chinese, 70% of respondents think that Chinese writing skill and Chinese Presentation skill are the most important skills they intended to learn if there is a Chinese Language Course provided. Almost half of the respondents think that reading skill is less important compared with Chinese writing skill and Presentation skill.

It seems that deterioration in Chinese abilities worries most of the students. Nearly 60% of the respondents think that a better Chinese Language can increase their competitiveness in job searching and over 50% of the respondents agreed that it should be compulsory to all students if the Chinese Language course is implemented.

Second questionnaire-Chinese ability test (10 questions basis)

With the aid of this Chinese ability test, students’ Chinese abilities on vocabularies and pronunciations were being tested. 50 respondents were examined and the results are quite surprising.

Less than 10% of the respondents scored more than 7 marks in this test. Only 28% of the respondents got 5-6 marks. Most of the respondents (just about 40%)fell into the category of 4-5 marks, which only get half of the questions right.

Vocabularies

There were so many students couldn’t identify and use the suitable words correctly. This problem is so serious that it may lead to misunderstanding of the reader. For example, “藉口” means “on the pretext of “, students always miswrote the radical. Instead of writing “藉口”, they wrote“籍口”, which we didn’t have this combination of “籍” (means the nationality of an individual) and “口”(means mouth)

Pronunciations

Many students couldn’t pronounce the words correctly, even the words that we commonly used. Incorrect pronunciations may lead to misunderstanding of the context. For example, “光” (means bright) pronounced as gwong1. Many students pronounced as gong1 “剛” (means strong or just). The meanings of these two words are totally different.

From this result, we raised a question that how could a student pronounce and write the words incorrectly having a good writing skill? The answer is simply no.

Online searching

(1)

(2)

From these two websites, we knew that except HKUST, other universities offered their students with the wide variety of language enhancement programmes. Some provided their students a basis for more advanced learning and some provided training on specific disciplines to cater for the needs of different professions.