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.
Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association
The ideographic myth, though much debunked, still exerts a powerful effect on the instruction of characters. This can be seen in the widespread focus on semantic radicals and the general neglect of phonetic components. At a more general level, the myth may also be responsible for the simplistic approach and peripheral attention to character instruction in many curricula and the lack of progress in instructional methodology as a whole. The present paper first summarizes the evidence for the primacy of phonetic information in characters and for regarding the phonetic component in semantic-phonetic compounds as the graphic and functional center. After enumerating the inadequacies in current character instruction, as exemplified in some elementary textbooks, it proposes a "phonic" approach to character instruction, which maximizes the use of the phonetic component for the recognition, recall and retention of characters. Along with some general principles, such as "persistence, inclusiveness, and emphasis on concrete, incremental and incidental learning, contextualized and synchronized with vocabulary acquisition", it also suggests some concrete exercise formats, such as "analysis and synthesis, comparison and contrast, analogy and back analogy, indicating sounds with characters" and so on. The paper ends with a discussion of some phonic advantages in typing Chinese using phonetic input.
A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core Vocabulary for Learners
2009
Mandarin Chinese, providing a list of the 5,000 words and the 2,000 Chinese characters most commonly used in the language. Based on a 50-million-wo「d corpus composed of spoken, fiction, non-fiction and news texts in current use, the dictionary provides the user with a detailed frequency-based list, as well as alphabetical and part-of-speech indexes. All entries in the frequency list feature the English equivalent and a sample sentence with English translation. The dictionary also contains 30 thematically organised lists of frequently used words on a variety of topics such as food, weather, travel and time expressions. their study of Mandarin vocabulary in an efficient and engaging way. It also represents an excellent resource for teachers of the language.