Mandarin Lesson
April 25th 2013 - 45 minutes
Learning intention:
Introduce furniture vocabularies using story of Chinese characters
Targeted concept: Connection: text, visual, meaning
Starter: Tell my experience about Chinese character (meaning of my name)
Content:
Showed three videos about story behind the Chinese characters and had discussion what stories/ explanation can be related to certain Chinese character.
Three videos link:
- Small table (ji) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku07gOQ7XNs
- House, family (jia): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1cxK-cXMY
- Door (men): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbmCFECbvSY
Distribute the vocabulary list of furniture (with illustration, character and pin yin)
Assessment Task:
Students pick one of the Chinese character shown in the video (jia, ji, men) retell and illustrate story for it. Then they will choose some han zi from the vocab list given and try to make up story and to illustrate explanation for those characters. Below is the example:
So I started the lesson by doing the test, because I didn’t have time to prepare more - I used 5 words from the sheet that the teachers already asked students to study at home – After I discussed what the students have learnt so far, I found out that the text was about conversation in the family. I asked one native student to teach me how to spell the words and I dictated the words to students. The problem with test and dictation is that students tend to memorize and finally they attempt to cheat when they found hard to do it. I’m sure students will forget it when they don’t use it anymore. anyway, this kind of assessment only promote lower thinking level and not relevant with concept based learning.
I tuned in the lesson with telling my own experience with Chinese character and told them the meaning of my name Liem Hui Yang (林惠阳). I could see that when I was telling this story they were engaged and eventually knew they will learn about meaning or story of Chinese characters. I must say that when students learn about things that were closed with them, the lesson will be more engaging, therefore when we do a lesson always try to start with tuning in/ provocation/ energizer by doing something light, simple, fun and real life context but still engaging.
I showed them 3 videos to find more information about story of Chinese characters (finding out stage). I chose Chinese characters which related with the current theme, which is about furniture (ji, men, jia). The 1st video is ji, I just played and students watched it, then we discussed how could the han zi match or represent the story behind it (story about small table used by Chinese people long time ago). Then I showed them the 2nd video and I paused in the middle and asked them to guess what the chinese character was. After I used some scaffolding questions to help, several students could answer and Janice got it (it’s jia means house, family). For the final video, I showed students the word first and then asked them how the story would be for this character. Once again, with the help of scaffolding instruction and questioning, some students got the story, and then I played the video so they can watch the real meaning or story of that Chinese character (it’s men – means door; one leafed or two leafed door). I found that scaffolding and questioning techniques are really effective to get students’ understanding.
to sort out the new knowledge they got, students did assessment task: students picked one of the Chinese character shown in the video (jia, ji, men) and then they retold and re-illustrate the story for it. Then they also chose some characters/ han zi from the vocab list given and try to make up story and to illustrate explanation for those characters. See the example above. The assessment that I did is more open ended instead of closed task like test. Open ended task will give you more insight on how deep is their understanding about the concept of Chinese characters, instead of only doing test which only measure their lower thinking level of some facts.
I know I will find more findings which will be helpful for improving our program if I got more chance to teach in some other mandarin class. I think next time, I need to focus more on the class management, since the students in that class were variably challenging in terms of behavior (such as Matthew Jo, Andrew, Andrew F, etc). I didn’t really focus on the class management, differentiation and inquiry, which will be my next target.
Resources I used and browsed as reference:
- How to write Chinese character – Door: http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/searchorder/1310242/%E9%97%A8/
- Learn some new furniture vocabs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Whyi4NkbQ
- Learn some simple vocabularies from video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15pbiSOuBaE or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_p8wIFsxQo from radio86 channel