Designing an Augmented Reality-enhanced Virtual Teaching Assistant to Promote Situational Learning of Chinese Characters

With the rapid development of educational technology, integrating emerging technologies into language education has become an important research focus. Augmented Reality (AR), which overlays virtual information onto real-world environments, provides new opportunities for interactive and contextualized learning. This study explores the design and effectiveness of an AR-based virtual teaching assistant for Chinese character instruction. In international Chinese language education, Chinese character learning is often challenging due to complex character structures and stroke order. The AR system functions as a virtual teaching assistant, guiding learners through stroke order, structural composition, and character evolution in a step-by-step manner. A quasi-experimental one-group pre-test and post-test design was adopted. Forty junior high school students from a public school in Chiang Mai, Thailand, participated in a one-month teaching experiment. Data were collected through tests, questionnaires, and classroom observations and analyzed using SPSS. The results indicate that the AR-based virtual assistant significantly improved students' Chinese character learning outcomes and increased their learning motivation. Students demonstrated high acceptance of the virtual teaching assistant and perceived it as highly feasible for classroom use. The findings suggest that AR-enhanced virtual teaching assistants can effectively support visualization of Chinese characters and promote contextualized language learning.