28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

these regions, there is a need to develop the scientific base of the discipline that is rooted in the
indigenous Chinese culture. This presentation will examine the need for indigenous models of
Chinese counseling. It will highlight aspects of research and theory development that are more
salient to Chinese regions, based on the existing literature. Also, in an age of globalization, this
presentation will also address practice and training issues, such that scientist-practitioners who
have the competence to use a global mind to address locally relevant issues could be trained.
3019 INVITED SYMPOSIUM
Language, culture, and symbolic processes: Comparisons between Chinese and English
Convener and Chair: K. Miller, USA
3019.1 Young children’s initial school experience with numbers, Chinese and English, C.H.
Liang, National Chiao Tung University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan, China
The goal of this study was to investigate young children’s initial school experience with numbers,
Chinese and English in a preschool classroom in Taipei. The 18 children were 3- to 4-year-old.
Most of them were first time enrolled in school. This study was ethnographic in approach.
Fieldwork combined with audio and video taping were conducted one day per week. For the
purpose of this paper, the first semester of the recordings were analyzed. The findings indicate that
the teachers employed different strategies in introducing the three symbolic systems and the
children applied their knowledge in various daily activities.
3019.2 Culture as reflected in a classroom: Comparison between Chinese and American
elementary school classrooms, X.B. Zhou, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Large differences between Western and Eastern cultures have been reported by social
psychologists. This paper discusses cultural differences in the classroom settings where children
spend most of their day learning and interacting with other children and adults (i.e. teachers).
Comparisons of activities during typical Chinese and American elementary school math classes
revealed that cultural values cause striking difference in classroom practice. Characteristics of the
classroom interactions, such as teacher’s questioning style, students’ participation, along with
general beliefs held by teachers regarding teaching and students’ learning will be examined with
in-depth consideration of cultural values and beliefs.
3019.3 The relationship between semantic and orthographic information for reading
development in Chinese, S.Y. Chen, Taipei Municipal Teachers College, Taipei, Taiwan, China
Previous studies showed the involvement of sub-character and character level semantic
information in Chinese reading development. This study examined the relationship between
semantic and orthographic information in Taiwanese children’s reading development. Results
revealed two major findings. First, for second and third graders, orally presented characters with
higher semantic similarity ratings were more likely to be judged as written identically. Second,
presented with written compound words, first graders rated homographic characters with higher
semantic similarity than non-homographic characters. In sum, the semantic and orthographic
information of Chinese characters influenced each other in Chinese reading development.
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