Learning Chinese with The Ribbit Ribbit Pond (original) (raw)
Review of Beginner's Chinese with Two Audio CDs; Intermediate chinese with Two Audio CDs
2006
As China emerges as a global economic and political power, interest in learning Chinese and learning about Chinese culture also increases. Some learn Chinese to be able to live and work in China; others learn Chinese just to be able to get around while traveling through the vast country. Just as in the learning of any language, textbooks are useful to learners when they meet learners' needs and goals for communicating in the target language. The books reviewed here, Ho's Beginner's Chinese and Intermediate Chinese, may best serve those learners whose needs and goals are to travel in China rather than those who want to live and work professionally there. Both Beginner's and Intermediate Chinese books are "based on the premise that less is more" and are "communication-oriented" (Intermediate, p. iii). Each book covers ten lessons organized by functional topics such as "Greetings" and "Money and Shopping" (Beginner's) and "Holidays and Festivals" and "Health and Fitness" (Intermediate). Both books teach vocabulary, grammar, and the written characters of Chinese by presenting three to four dialogs in each lesson. The dialogs can be heard on an accompanying audio CD, although Beginner's Chinese has an additional CD for pinyin and tones (pronunciation) practice. In addition, both books include answer keys to each lesson's exercises and appendices on further resources, both print and online, for self-study of Chinese.
Review of a Website: Chinese Reading World.
Chinese as a Second Language, 2016
Chinese Reading World 中文阅读天地 (http://collections.uiowa.edu/chinese/) is a database that provides level-appropriate reading materials to Chinese teachers and learners for free. This website was designed and constructed by Professor Helen H. Shen and her team-members from the University of Iowa in 2007–2009, and is supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The website of-fers an extensive range of reading materials selected from newspapers, books, and online resources. On this website, a total of 900 articles is evenly divided into three proficiency levels — elementary, intermediate, and advanced. Each level is divided into 30 units, and each unit has 10 articles. The strengths of the website lie in its structure, content, potential use, and learning aid tools. In the following sections, I first review its specific strong points with examples. Then I suggest possible future improvements.
2021
Preface (by Ivan) PREFACE The Ribbit-Ribbit Pond is a children’s book that resulted of my inquiry into a number of areas in the field of Applied Linguistics. My creative process of the book was informed mostly by theories on how to develop intercultural communicative competence, and on how to follow the principles of translanguaging literacy. Moreover, the content of the book, both in the verbal and visual modes, attends to the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of language, two concepts that are crucial for Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). As a result, the text of the story was written by paying attention to the following concepts of SFL: transitivity, nominal group structures, and appraisal (see Appendices 2, 3, and 4); the images, on the other hand, were constructed in light of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s principles about the interactive meanings in images and their narrative structures (2006) (Appendices 5 and 6), and Painter’s system of visual focalisation and logico-semantic relations (2007) (Appendices 5 and 7). It is the combination of all these theories that enable The Ribbit-Ribbit Pond to transmit a positive attitude towards immigration and multilingualism in children. Nevertheless, you will notice that the amount of literature I review has been minimised, and a great deal of terms have been left out of the report or de-technicalised when possible. Indeed, this dissertation does not follow the writing conventions established for research papers. This is mostly because this is a project-based dissertation, and as such, this document needed to be structured so as to serve the purpose of the project; in a sense, I had to create my own genre that complied with the purposes of my project. 8 This dissertation is meant to be read not only by an academic audience, but also by a more general audience who might be interested in doing their own research and projects. Thus, I have minimised my literature review and de-technichalised terms in order to make my project accessible to my target audience. On top of this, the format of this dissertation adopts a pedagogical approach; what in other dissertations you can find as chapters, here you will find them as units, and each unit has been further divided into different lessons that examine an aspect of my project with the purpose of teaching readers how I fulfilled my project, and of guiding them in the fulfilment of theirs. Unit 1 meticulously describes the Ribbit-Ribbit Pond project, which is presented and explained as a CREDIBLE project. Unit 2 provides a review of the literature that informed and guided my creative process, specifically the following: the development of intercultural communicative competence, translanguaging, and the study of language in both verbal and visual modes from a social semiotic perspective. Next, Unit 3 deconstructs The Ribbit-Ribbit Pond and presents a thorough analysis and discussion of the semiotic resources employed in the book. Unit 4 provides a note on the pedagogical value of The Ribbit-Ribbit Pond for English language educators, whose work has motivated me to engage in the creation of this book. Lastly, Unit 5 offers the reader a discussion of the limitations and implications of my project, and a summary of the strategies that have been employed, which is expected to prepare and guide them in their future projects.
Practice and Research on Chinese for Specific Purposes
International Journal of Chinese Language Teaching
During the past two decades, Chinese for Specific Purposes (CSP) has emerged as a new trend and quickly become a sub-field of International Chinese Education, while drawing increasing attention among Chinese learners as well as teaching professionals. A main reason for the increasing relevance of CSP is that many, if not all, Chinese learners, have more-or-less specific and sometimes immediate language needs that require more than generalized knowledge alone. The courses of CSP are designed to meet specified needs of the learner. Once a specific purpose has been identified, a well-designed CSP course aims to be built around three main components: (a) the acquisition of the Chinese language skills for the specific communication use; (b) exposing learners to Chinese cultures with focus on the specific area; and (c) fostering an appreciation of different ways of thinking when dealing with the specific subject. By striving for these outcomes, CSP courses can provide an invaluable alternative or supplement to general Chinese language courses. This special issue of IJCLT focuses on research into different pedagogic approaches towards Chinese for Specific Purposes (CSP). There are a total of seven papers selected as the best submissions across a wide range of work. The following are summaries of these papers. Lin Zhou, from UIBE, discusses issues with vocabulary in medical Chinese textbooks. Her paper is titled 中医汉语教材词汇选编的科学性问题研究 / A Study on the Scientific Issues of Vocabulary Selection and Compilation in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)Textbooks. The study chose 8 representative textbooks in the field of teaching Chinese for TCM purpose, and used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the selection and compilation of vocabulary from the following perspectives: size, allocation, repetition and interpretation/explanation. The study suggests that there should be more vocabulary in textbooks at an advanced level than at an elementary level and the repetition rate of new words should be increased too. The findings also provide a clear picture of how vocabulary of TCM can be explained to foreign learners from different cultural backgrounds and how to scientifically allocate new words in different types of textbooks. Mien-Hwa Chiang, from University of Pennsylvania, looks at the teaching of Media Chinese. Her paper is titled 高年级媒体中文课的相关概念与教学 / Concepts and Practices in Teaching Advancedlevel Media Chinese. In her study, she points out the benefits of a Media Chinese course cannot be overlooked despite challenges in teaching such a course, e.g. skepticism students hold towards the
Elements of a Chinese Language Game
In this paper, we elaborate on work presented at the Dutch crossmedia PICNIC festival, in a special symposium entitled: the China Language Bridge. We will discuss a number of online resources, including games, for learning the chinese language, including chinese characters which are also used in japanese. After a brief digression on potential pitfalls in using online translation services, we will present some ideas, and indicate in what way these ideas might be realized using the XIMPEL interactive video platform, developed on top of the open source flex/as3 SDK. Such an approach would cover both the need to introduce appropriate context to stimulate language learning, as well as the unaviodable repetitions, which often proves to be one of the main obstacles for eective language learning.
Volume 12, Number 4, Serial Number 109 of US-China Education Review B
This paper case-studies how three hearing mothers make sense of their own and their deaf children's experiences from a view of discourse as a social practice. For this purpose, it examines how participating mothers represent themselves and their children in discourse by looking at the frames and footings that emerge from their relationship with each other and with their utterances and by associating findings with the socio-cultural context at large. The analysis indicates that the mothers represent themselves as "pro-active" and "caring" mothers as well as "reluctant" to accept their children's deafness. Reported speech was the main strategy used in talk to solve conflicting situations and avoid confronting the lack of acceptance of their children's deafness.