Podcast | Anna Yi Leung

Drowning in Digital Homework? Reflections on Assessment Design and Habit Building for Primary School Children

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Many parents have shared with me the same doubt: their kids claim that they’re doing homework, and the next moment they’re gaming instead. Are electronic gadgets learning tools, or triggers for family conflicts?

I am happy to have Ms. Lam, a Chinese-language teacher with more than ten years of experience in Hong Kong primary schools, for an in-depth conversation on how to help children build healthy habits around digital devices at home. This blog post brings together some of the main points that we’ve discussed.

The full podcast episode is now live on YouTube (original audio in Cantonese)：

How parents feel about digital homework

Based on Ms Lam’s experience teaching in Hong Kong primary schools, parents of older primary students tend to be more resistant to digital homework than parents of younger children. One common concern is that children will use “doing homework” as an excuse to play games or browse the internet.

Among parents of younger students, attitudes towards e-homework are more mixed. Some appreciate gamified digital homework for knowledge consolidation because children can often complete it without much parental help. But when an assignment requires a parent to help with recording audio or video, it can quickly become a burden.

Ms Lam made an important point: teachers are not necessarily expecting these assignments to be perfect. The purpose of an audio or video task may simply be to practise oral communication, rather than to produce a polished final product. If parents can let go of the expectation that every assignment needs to be flawless, the whole process can become much less stressful.

Children need to be taught how to use digital learning tools

In this podcast episode, I also shared something I’ve noticed in Germany: many primary school children grow up using tablets but are surprisingly unfamiliar with typing on a keyboard because they’re so used to touchscreens.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in Hong Kong, according to Ms Lam. Children may struggle with keyboards, logging into accounts, or even recognising the symbols used in passwords.

It is a useful reminder that being surrounded by technology does not automatically make a child digitally competent. Children still need to be taught how to use these tools, both in terms of practical skills and in terms of how to stay focused while using them.

The real issue is self-control

When children use digital homework as an excuse to play games, an understandable response from parents is to ban the tablet altogether. Ms Lam, however, believes that an outright ban can easily backfire. It avoids the temptation rather than teaching children how to manage it.

One practical strategy she suggested is to create clear associations between particular places, times and activities. Homework might always be done at a desk or in a quiet corner, while entertainment takes place somewhere more relaxed, such as the sofa. A timer can also help children understand that different times and spaces are associated with different activities.

Building habits is a marathon, not a sprint. Rather than expecting children to follow every rule perfectly from the beginning, parents can start with a realistic standard, allow some distraction and mistakes, and gradually help them improve.

Useful tips on effective reward systems

Ms Lam also shared an interesting principle for reward systems: some of the most meaningful rewards are things that money cannot buy.

For example, a child might earn the chance to choose what the family has for dinner, or enjoy some dedicated one-to-one time with a parent. Praise can also focus on the child’s effort and attitude rather than their marks, so that achievement does not become too closely tied to self-worth.

One thing she would avoid is using “allowing ten more minutes on the iPad” as a reward. Doing so can unintentionally make screen time seem even more desirable.

Takeaways for teachers and parents

For teachers, Ms Lam suggested taking a careful look at digital homework before assigning it: check the accuracy of AI-generated materials, and ask whether a particular task genuinely needs to be digital in the first place.

For parents, some practical steps are equally simple. Try not to schedule digital homework during the hour before bedtime. And when family circumstances genuinely make it difficult to complete an assignment on time, communicate with the teacher rather than struggling in silence. In many cases, there may be room for flexibility.

Digital homework is increasingly popular in primary education, and that does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. With clear routines around time, place and rewards, learning to use digital tools well can also become an opportunity for children to practise self-regulation and gradually take more responsibility for their own learning.

This is a summary of my conversation with Ms. Lam on my podcast, Pacing Between Classroom and Lab. For the complete, word for word transcript translated into English, head over to

Can't Even Copy Correctly? The Changing State of Handwriting in Hong Kong Primary Schools

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

“Even when you give kids the answers to copy, they still can’t get full marks”. I invited my university classmate and good friend, Ms. Lam, a Chinese-language teacher with ten years of experience in Hong Kong primary schools, to help unpack two tasks that sound basic but are often overlooked in Chinese language learning: copying and dictation.

From psycholinguistics, to the government’s curriculum guidelines, to the way we grip a pencil, to what handwriting even means in the age of AI, we take a deep dive into how handwriting ability is changing among young learners in Hong Kong, and the challenges that come with it.

This podcast episode is now live: “Can’t Even Copy Correctly? (Audio in Cantonese)”:

The Joke That’s Actually a Warning Sign

There’s a joke Hong Kong primary school teachers keep making to each other: “Even when you give kids the answers to copy, they still can’t get full marks”.

It sounds absurd. If a child is looking straight at the correct answer, how do they still get it wrong? But teachers across grade levels see this constantly, and it points to something deeper about how children actually learn to read and write Chinese.

The full, word for word transcript (translated in English from the original Cantonese audio) of my conversation with Ms. Lam is available on . Here’s a plain-language summary of what we covered.

Ms. Lam explained that the joke isn’t really about laziness. It’s become a kind of shorthand among teachers because they’ve noticed a real pattern: students being careless in ways that are hard to explain. Even with a model answer directly in front of them, children copying it make frequent mistakes and lose marks. This happens at both junior and senior primary levels, which is part of why the joke has stuck around.

It’s not just a classroom problem either. Parents run into the same thing at home. A child doesn’t know how to write a character, asks an adult, watches the adult write it out on scratch paper, then copies it, and still gets it wrong. It’s a small moment, but it captures something real about how much is actually happening when a child copies a character, and how easy it is to assume that copying is the easy part.

Copying and Dictation Are Not the Same Skill

Before going further, it helps to differentiate a few concepts that sound similar but are cognitively quite different.

Character recognition is simply the ability to look at a character and read it aloud. Interestingly, research on Hong Kong children shows that before around Grade 4 or 5, kids who haven’t been explicitly taught to break characters into components tend to memorise each character as one whole visual image (Tong & McBride-Chang, 2010), the same way you’d recognise a friend’s face without being able to describe the exact shape of their nose. This is called holistic processing.

Copying and dictation, though, are different tasks entirely, even though both involve producing a character by hand.

With copying, a model character sits right in front of the child. They can look at it while writing and check their own work afterward. It leans on visual tracking and short-term memory, holding the character’s shape in mind just long enough to put it on paper.

Dictation removes the model entirely. There’s nothing to look at. The child has to pull the character’s shape from long-term memory while simultaneously processing the sound they just heard, which places much heavier demands on memory overall.

This distinction turns out to matter a lot. A 2011 study by McBride-Chang and colleagues, looking at Hong Kong students in Primary 3 and 4, found that even after controlling for intelligence and general orthographic processing ability, a child’s copying skill independently predicted how well they could recognise characters and perform on dictation. In other words, copying isn’t just a warm-up version of dictation. It’s a distinct skill that contributes something of its own to a child’s overall literacy.

What Hong Kong’s Curriculum Actually Asks of Six-Year-Olds?

The Hong Kong Education Bureau’s current guidelines for junior primary Chinese follow a principle of “more character recognition, more vocabulary recognition, moderate dictation.” Recognition and writing are treated as separate goals. The idea is to expand what children can read quickly, without correspondingly expanding how much they’re required to write by hand.

According to Ms. lam, by the end of Primary 3, the general target is for students to recognise somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 commonly used characters, an estimate schools derive from the Hong Kong Primary School Word List, which is publicly available online.

But recognition is only one piece. Starting in Primary 1, children are also expected to learn basic strokes (horizontal, vertical, left-falling, diagonal) and how to name and write each one, common radicals and components, like the “three dots of water” (氵), the “four dots of fire” (灬), or the “speech” radical (言), including how these change shape depending on where they sit in a character, and the difference between a radical and a shared component. For instance, the character 青 shows up in words paired with the “insect” radical or the “speech” radical to form entirely different meanings, and children need to learn to use these patterns to infer both sound and meaning. They also learn character structure: top-bottom, left-right, semi-enclosed, fully enclosed, patterns that students are expected to be able to name by Primary 1.

Alongside all of this, the curriculum places real emphasis on writing mechanics: pencil grip, stroke order, and whether a child is even using appropriate writing tools. Teachers are expected to coach this directly and to communicate with parents about reinforcing it at home. It’s a lot to ask of a six-year-old in their first year of formal schooling. It’s also worth remembering that mechanical, repetitive copying (writing the same character dozens of times) is actually discouraged by the Education Bureau today. What’s assigned now is meant to be more deliberate, if lighter in volume.

How Hong Kong Kids Actually Perform in Practice?

Ms. Lam’s school gives incoming Primary 1 students a pre-test on 150 common high-frequency characters. The spread is wide: weaker students might recognise only a dozen or so, while stronger students can already recognise over a hundred.

Writing is a separate story. Many children arrive without a proper pencil grip. Some press so hard it hurts, others barely press at all, leaving faint, unclear marks. Stroke order is often wrong, simply because kindergarten involves relatively little actual writing. In more serious cases, some children can’t yet write their own Chinese name correctly and need to be corrected stroke by stroke.

By the end of Primary 1, the gap narrows somewhat. Some students recognise all 150 characters, though weaker students might only reach fifty. Most children have adopted a correct pencil grip by this point, though it needs constant reinforcement, and a “speed over accuracy” pattern is common: write carefully and you slow down dramatically, but with only about thirty-five minutes per lesson, there’s real pressure to be both fast and accurate, a combination not many students manage yet.

Why This Matters Far Beyond Chinese Class?

It would be easy to file all of this under “Chinese class problems,” but Ms. Lam was clear that the effects reach much further.

Grades 1 through 3 are essentially about learning how to read. If a child’s vocabulary is thin at this stage, that shaky foundation shows up everywhere. Math, Humanities, and Science all rely heavily on written Chinese, so weak character recognition drags down performance across subjects. Exams reflect this directly too: writing the wrong character, or getting a unit of measurement wrong in a Math word problem, costs marks in that subject, not just in Chinese.

There’s also a developmental argument. Ms. Lam pointed to research suggesting that handwriting stimulates the brain through muscle-based training, supporting neural network development more broadly. The physical process of writing, figuring out stroke order, balancing a character’s structure, also builds logical thinking and spatial awareness, skills that show up well beyond language class.

Do Kids Even Need Handwriting Anymore?

This is the question Ms. Lam says students themselves ask her constantly: “Ms. Lam, we all use tablets now. Why do we still need to practice handwriting?”

Her answer is that handwriting was never really about producing neat output. A printer already does that better, faster, and without mistakes. The actual value of handwriting is in what it trains: the brain’s neural networks, yes, but also self-monitoring and self-correction. While writing, a child is constantly checking their own work against the model, building focus and attentiveness in the process. Handwriting also builds something closer to patience, the ability to push through ten vocabulary words even when you want to quit by the fifth. None of this is something an AI tool or tablet can replace.

At the same time, she’s clear-eyed about where technology already fits in. Hong Kong schools now generally run BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programmes, and for group tasks or research, students overwhelmingly reach for voice input over handwriting. It’s simply faster. Interestingly, though, voice input has a real weak spot: if a child’s pronunciation isn’t precise, or the classroom is noisy, the device can’t recognise the character they mean, and the student has to fall back on handwriting or pinyin input instead. Handwriting, in other words, hasn’t become obsolete. It’s become a backup skill that’s still very much required.

Practical Tips for Teachers and Parents

Ms. Lam shared a handful of concrete techniques that came up in the full conversation.

Sky-writing and chanting: having children trace strokes in the air, following a teacher’s hand, before ever putting pencil to paper. It builds stroke order through movement rather than static repetition.
Color-coding connecting strokes: using a coloured pen to mark specific strokes helps children learn to count strokes accurately, which in turn helps them catch their own mistakes. An added or missing stroke can turn one character into a completely different one.
Mnemonics and storytelling: decoding a complex character into its components and building a small story around them. Ms. Lam’s own example, for the character 邊 (meaning “side”), turns the components into a tale about someone going to the beach, meeting a square-shaped monster, and escaping on a boat, a playful way to lock in both the shape and the stroke order.

For parents without much spare time, she suggested simple, low-effort ways to build the underlying skills: character-guessing riddles during the car ride to school, and fine-motor-skill games like pinching clothespins, playing with playdough, or practicing buttons and shoelaces, all of which support the hand control that handwriting depends on.

Her broader point, though, was less about technique and more about presence. Children consistently say what they want most on weekends is simply for a parent to play with them. Learning that happens inside that kind of relaxed, connected time tends to stick far better than anything drilled through repetition alone.

Take-Home Message

Ms. Lam and I closed the conversation with a reminder that’s easy to lose sight of when you’re staring down a stack of dictation tests: a child’s learning is a long process, and mistakes are part of how they get better, not a sign that something’s going wrong. Growth isn’t a straight line. It has its ups and downs, but the overall learning curve, given room to make experience trials-and-error, would move upward.

References:

McBride-Chang, C., Chung, K. K., & Tong, X. (2011). Copying skills in relation to word reading and writing in Chinese children with and without dyslexia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 110(3), 422-433.
Tong, X., & McBride-Chang, C. (2010). Developmental models of learning to read Chinese words. Developmental Psychology, 46(6), 1662–1676.

This is a summary of my conversation with Ms. Lam on my podcast, Pacing Between Classroom and Lab. For the complete, word for word transcript translated into English, head over to .

The Autism Behaviour We Often Misunderstand (Part 2)

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Following my previous , in which my friend, Ms. Lilian Ho, and I discussed the social difficulties and language characteristics of children with ASD, the second part of my podcast show continues to explore the sensory sensitivities of children with ASD, and why some of them find changes in their daily lives particularly distressing.

This podcast episode is now live: “Teacher Talk: The Autism Behaviour We Often Misunderstand (Part 2)”:

The full transcript in English (translated from the original Cantonese audio) of the episode is also available on my Substack:

The Autism Behaviour We Often Misunderstand (Part 1)

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

This week, I invited my friend, Ms. Lilian Ho, to record a podcast episode on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Lilian is an experienced educator who has taught English at primary schools, secondary schools, and kindergartens in Hong Kong, with extensive experience in inclusive education.

We discussed the social difficulties and language characteristics of children with ASD, and explored practical examples of how teachers and parents can use “Social Stories” to support ASD children in developing social skills.

This podcast episode is now live: “Teacher Talk: The Autism Behaviour We Often Misunderstand (Part 1)”:

The full transcript in English (translated from the original Cantonese audio) of the episode is also available on my Substack:

Walk Alongside Children with ADHD

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently invited an old classmate and a close friend, Kathy, to record a podcast episode together. We discussed the gap between ADHD research findings and the realities of classroom teaching.

Kathy worked as a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong for over ten years before later supporting SEN students in primary schools. She has extensive teaching experience and eventually moved to New Zealand to study educational psychology. I’ve learnt a lot through our conversation.

In this podcast episode, we discuss how teachers may recognise behavioural characteristics associated with ADHD, and why both educators and parents benefit from developing a stronger scientific understanding of ADHD. At the same time, even when research evidence is available, there are still significant challenges in translating scientific findings into real classroom practice.

Kathy also shares several practical teaching examples and principles, including:

Common classroom behaviour observed among children with ADHD
Why language learning and Chinese writing acquisition can be particularly demanding for some children
How adjustments in teaching approaches can help children participate more confidently in class
Ways parents can support children at home
How we can more compassionately understand children’s behaviour and learning difficulties

The most memorable point from Kathy was that supporting children with ADHD is, in many ways, no different from supporting any other child. They are all simply children. What they need is not only more cognitive-behavioural training, but also more understanding and patience from adults. We don’t mentor; we walk with them.

This left me reflecting on something broader: approaching research and education with a mindset of treating all people with equality is itself a fundamental form of humanism. Should we then have “special education”, if education is just for all?

Anyway, the podcast will be held trilingually (English, Cantonese, Mandarin), depending on the preference of the guests. I hope the subtitle translation on YouTube can benefit conversations across communities despite the language we speak.

The first episode is now live: “From the Classroom to Educational Psychology: Walk Alongside Children with ADHD”: