Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract/Objectives
The researcher had provided Chinese language teaching services to students in a low-income community in Khon Kaen, Northern Thailand, through remote online teaching. Among the 23 families served by the researcher, 22 were of low socio-economic status. Education has the potential to bring significant positive changes to these families' lives. Therefore, this study aimed to use picture books in remote teaching to enhance the Chinese literacy and reading comprehension abilities of students in Northern Thailand. The research objectives were (1) to investigate the teaching effectiveness of using picture books in remote teaching to improve the Chinese literacy of students in Northern Thailand, and (2) to investigate the teaching effectiveness of using picture books in remote teaching to enhance the reading comprehension ability of students in Northern Thailand, using a case study design.
Results/Contributions

Through the integration of picture books into distance Chinese teaching, both participants in this study showed improvement in their Chinese vocabulary recognition. The researcher found that the use of picture books in distance Chinese teaching increased the exposure of Thai students to Chinese characters and words, leading to better learning outcomes in word recognition skills such as character recognition, phonetic analysis, and character meaning recognition. However, the character recognition ability in the vocabulary recognition skill did not show improvement, as the study duration was not sufficient to accumulate enough vocabulary for participants to develop an understanding of Chinese character formation rules.

 

Through the integration of picture books into distance Chinese teaching, both participants in this study showed improvement in their semantic comprehension, text integration, and inference abilities. However, their grammatical analysis ability in reading comprehension did not show improvement. The researcher observed that the improvement in these abilities was mainly based on the growth in vocabulary recognition. Therefore, the researcher concluded that the integration of picture books into distance Chinese teaching did not significantly improve the reading comprehension ability of the two Thai participants.

Keywords
Picture book teaching, remote teaching, Chinese language, literacy, reading comprehension, students in Northern Thailand.