Participants of the Workshop are welcome to contribute questions of their concern by sending them to bo.hu@orinst.ox.ac.uk
We may not be able to cover all the questions here, if you have any preference, please let us know (bo.hu@orinst.ox.ac.uk). We will try out best to prioritise them.
The finalised questions will be dealt with in rounds each of which contain one question from each of the four headings.
Questions
Characters
1. What is the best way to motivate the students to learn the characters?
2. Do you teach your students ‘guessing techniques’ for unknown characters? If so, what are they?
3. Do you use extra materials for character teaching? Is there any good book you would recommend to use in the classroom for characters teaching and exercises?
4. What advice can we give to the students for learning characters? What is the most effective way for the students to associate the sounds and the characters?
5. How can I help my students to remember more characters?
Tones
1. My students don’t like drills. How can I teach them Chinese pronunciation?
2. One student did not think tones very importantly, once I tried to persuade him that he should spend more time on tones, he argued ‘why should I? Everybody understands what I am saying, then that’s fine?’ What should I say?
3. How can I help students to discover the lowest and highest parts of their speaking voice? (
4. Some students seem to lack flair in pronunciation, it seems that their tone cannot be improved. I tried to model, explain why their pronunciation is wrong, how they should control their pitches, but nothing worked. What should I do?
5. How should I treat the errors that the students made in the following recordings?
Links to students sound file
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/WorkshopTones/tones.htm
Grammar:
1. What do you feel are the keys to successfully teaching newspaper reading in Chinese? How important is it for the students to find the skeleton structure, i.e, SVO and then add in the subordinate or additional information? How do you instruct the students to detect the SVO efficiently?
2. What references have you found useful in grammar teaching?
3. How do you teach grammar?
The following are examples to help the participants of the Workshop to propose questions of their concern
1. What is the difference between 得and 地
e.g. 他努力地工作。and 他工作得努力。and 他努力工作。and 他工作努力。
他不停地说。and 他说得不停。
她过得很好。and 她很好地过。
(if any above is wrong, please explain why it is wrong)
2. What is the difference between
我昨天去商店买东西。and 我昨天去商店买东西了。
我做完。and 我做完了。
他喝完酒了。and 他把酒喝完了。
3. What is the function of 了 in 我们是多年的老朋友了。
4. What is the difference between
他买什么？and 他买什么呢？
5. Why are the following sentences wrong?
我把我朋友的照相机用来跟他照相。
这篇文章被他写。
Classroom Situation
1. What is the best way to assign tasks when there is a mixed level of students in one class? Shall I group the same level together? Shall I avoid group exercises?
2. How can I encourage my students to speak more in class?
3. Should I correct my student’s mistakes when he/she is speaking Chinese enthusiastically?
4. How can I avoid the talkative ones answering almost all the questions without upsetting the person?
Question Time:
1. What do you think that a non-native speaker can bring to the teaching process or do you feel that the language should only be taught by native speakers? (Ms Vine from Westminster University)