During the spring term, the Hill’s Chinese program launched a free on-line curricular and research platform trial with Gowell, a Hong Kong based educational technology and publishing company. Gowell's Chinese component “GoChinese” brings to life learning materials by generating voice output, and other miscellaneous learning support. The program was very successful and will be used during the 2009-10 academic year in Hill's Chinese 2 and 2 Honors, and Chinese 3 and 3 Honors classes.

Although the trial was limited in both time and scope, the majority of students who had an opportunity to utilize the program in-depth had exceptionally positive experiences. One Chinese 3 Honors student comments, “GoChinese was one of the best tools I have ever utilized in a school setting. The breaking down of sentence, translation, and pinyin pronunciation was incredible. GoChinese was one of the main reasons why I learned so much…. The only thing is, I wish I had been able to use such a great tool all year long.”

Another student also says, “GoChinese is the most useful tool among all programs we used. It has the capacity to help students read and revise their Chinese writing, helping them save so much time. Instead of looking up each word or character separately in a dictionary, (the program) automatically traces those steps all at once and puts them together for easier access. I wish we used this from the very beginning of the year.”

One unexpected but happy episode of our collaboration was realizing that our 2009 Sixth Form Leadership Award winner, Bernard Chan '83, has been a subscriber to the program ever since he juried Gowell’s winning of both the top Asia Pacific ICT Award (APICTA) in Education and Training, and the Hong Kong ICT Grand Award in eLearning in 2006.

The Chinese program would like to express its heart-felt gratitude to Linda Wu, Gowell's director, for her tireless and generous support. We look forward to GoChinese’s continued contribution to the learning and growth of all lovers of Chinese language and culture at Hill.