Chinese at home

Chinese

Zheng laoshi appreciate all your efforts in trying to learn Chinese remotely.

This term, Zheng laoshi has set up high expectations by introducing more language input for the remote learning of Chinese. All levels except for Foundation level will learn short stories in Chinese, focusing on listening comprehension in Chinese.

Though we cannot do interactive language learning in the classroom setting, the advantage of learning remotely through video clips means that you could play the clips as often as you like, or break it up to smaller sections, or pause it or adjust the playing speed to suit your learning. As the video clips model language use and words are repeated in different situations whenever possible, explicit teaching of grammar and word to word translation will not be the focus. Instead, students listen, repeat, gesture and speak the words and sentences when watching the videos. Students could also practice speaking by using the new words learnt in that week in a phrase or sentence (please provide English translation for your phrase or sentence) and share an audio or video of the speaking with Zheng laoshi.

Please only send them during the weeks in which the new words are learnt.

A gestured approach is used in the video clips to help students associate gestures with meaning. Gestures will be used in the storytelling to help students understand the story in Chinese. It is very helpful if students could gesture after I speak a sentence in Chinese, as this is a good indication that students understand the meaning of the sentence. The gestures demonstrate students’ ability to associate spoken Chinese with meaning without having to resort to speaking English.

Thank you Bimbadeen families for supporting your children’s remote learning of Chinese. I am grateful for the feedback, ideas and suggestions I have received. I appreciate the work you have put into to record students speaking in Chinese and sharing with me. I have adapted some of the suggestions by putting in the ‘Chinese Lesson Plans and Answer Sheets’ post via Sentral on Monday 27th of July. These resources can be used as a running sheet to check off tasks and the translations might help you to understand what’s been said in each video.

I wish you all the best and hope you all have a great week!

Congratulations to the following students for sharing their Chinese work with Zheng laoshi early in the week:

Harrison E of 1/2R, Dom N of 1/2S, Grace E of 0BD and Hayley N of 0MR.

Speaking Chinese with puppets videos: