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Power Point
Classroom Activities for Beginning Chinese Language
created by Mary Jacob
last
revised
November 11, 2004
Note: If you do not have Office 2000 on your computer,
you will need to download the Power
Point
viewer, which is free from Microsoft. You will also need to have
Chinese fonts installed on your computer.
Over the past several years, I have developed a method
for "picture drill," which I presented at the conference on
Chinese Language Instructional Materials in Hawaii, summer 2003. The
proceedings from the conference, currently in press, will include my
article explaining the process in
more detail. These presentations are designed for use with Integrated
Chinese level 1 parts 1 and 2. They were created by Mary Jacob
for her Chinese 1-4 classes at UC Davis. I have made
them available
on the
web
for
the convenience of others who may wish to use them, but keep in mind that
they are always under development.
Use in the classroom:
- Rationale: Today's college students are increasing
oriented toward visual learning. This exercise is designed to reinforce
sentence patterns using a multi-modal activity, enabling the teacher
to reach students with various learning styles in a single exercise.
It is basically an oral drill that has been enriched by visual input
of several kinds and expanded into a communicative activity. To the
greatest degree possible, the cues are pictures. The sentence pattern
is usually also displayed at the top of each slide for student reference.
Students see the picture and the sentence pattern, then, after they
hear a classmate utter the correct sentence, they read the sentence
in characters. The teacher can avoid using English during the drill
portion entirely, yet still be sure that students know what they are
saying. This structured activity is intended as a bridge to more open-ended
communicative activities, thus it should be used around the middle of
the lesson.
- Preparation: Introduce the sentence pattern and
give some examples, preferably the day before the Power Point is to
be used.
- Use: Open the presentation in the classroom using
data projection.
- Review one pattern. For this part, you may need to use some English,
but keep it to a minimum. Make sure that all students understand
what the pattern means.
- Most of the slides are in a question-answer format. Have one
student generate the correct question based on the pattern and
picture.
- Then display the question, say it out loud yourself, and have
the whole class repeat it.
- In as conversational a tone as possible, ask a second student
the question. That student should respond based on the picture.
- After the second student generates the correct answer, display
the answer, say it out loud yourself, and have the whole class
repeat
it.
- Follow-up: After doing the set of slides for one
pattern, have the class work in pairs or small groups making up their
own mini-exchanges based on the pattern. The ideal time for homework
assignments based on the pattern is after the pair work.
- Additional notes:
- You may wish to build up to the
utterance by asking the class shorter, simpler questions in
Chinese about the picture, such as "Who is that?" "Where
is
he?" etc.
prior to having the student generate the question. This allows
you to have mini-exchanges of true communication and reviews the
necessary
vocabulary in advance.
- I usually do only one pattern per class
session, at the most two patterns.
The
time
spent
in the Power Point drill itself should be about 20 minutes, not
including the preparation and follow-up. I try to avoid spending
an entire
class session just on Power Point drills, but rather combine
it with other
activities.
- I do not advocate using the Power Point drill every single day.
It should be used in combination with a wide variety of other activities.
- I am always in the processing of revising and adding to the Power
Points. Currently, I am adding suggestions for pair-work after the
slides for each pattern.
Chinese 1:
Chinese 2:
Chinese 3:
Chinese 4:
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