Chinese Beginner 1 Course Training
Course overview
Chinese Beginner 1 course has 10 lessons, to be taken over 10 weeks in any weekday evenings or over 5 weeks in an intensive course on Saturdays.
Our Chinese Beginner 1 Course is designed for beginners with zero or little Chinese learning. Students will start with intensive Pinyin (phonetic system) pronunciation training to build the foundation for any further learning. 20 essential Hani (written system) and its history will also be introduced in this course. There is a strong focus in conversational practise in each of our lessons.
Our topics in this course include greetings, self-introduction, numbers, countries, job, daily activities etc. Our key grammar points covered include basic sentence structures, basic question forms, 是 , 有 and 在 sentences, use of adjectives and adverbs.
Lesson Topics
Lesson 1 – Greeting
Lesson 2 – Nationality
Lesson 3 – Numbers
Lesson 4 – Family
Lesson 5 – Job
Lesson 6 – Mid course review and practise
Lesson 7 – Phone Numbers
Lesson 8 – Birthday
Lesson 9 – Weekly Routine
Lesson 10 – Total review and practise
Understand the students
To start off, we must understand students are mostly complete beginners. Put yourself in their shoes to imagine your first-day attending say a Russian or Greek lesson. How would you feel?
You might not have any idea of how the language works! You might even have some preconceptions that Mandarin is a very difficult language to learn, as it is a tonal language with a challenging writing system. You might find the sounds very alien and difficult! You might be full of curiosity and questions! The same thing is going through your students’ heads.
The key thing is to show students it’s actually EASY to learn Chinese, for example, only 409 syllabi, could be easy to read and speak with Pinyin! So in no time, they can conduct a conversation in Chinese already. At the same time, Chinese characters are fun! They have stories behind them. We won’t teach them different Hanzi and how to handwrite each Hanzi at the beginner stage.
Lastly, remember to ask students to use Quizlet flashcards, and our review podcasts after class to revise. And encourage students to submit audio homework each week into their class group! This is very motivating to the class as a group.
We use our own course books for students. Make sure to read and understand all our material thoroughly before each lesson. This process will equip you with the required subject knowledge and confidence.
1) Fluency coursebook: Book Level 1A, we also call it Discover Chinese 1A, we teach 8 lessons out of the 10
2) Pinyin coursebook: Pinyin 1 Tune it Right, we teach all 10 lessons
3) Hanzi coursebook: Hanzi Level 1 Book A, we only teach 2 lessons out of the 6.
4) Printouts: including flashcards, activities, and worksheets mostly for review lessons
5) Digital material: Fluency book Kahoot, Pinyin Kahoot, Hanzi Quizlet, Review Quizlet, Review podcasts.
All material can be accessed on Zoho platform, please request access.
Understand the Materials
course Introduction – Beginner 1-4
- Course curriculum
- Typical lesson plan
- How to use the course books including fluency main book, Pinyin & Hanzi books
- How to use other digital resources
- How to teach a student-led classroom including lesson time control, varieties of interactions, ie T-SSS, S-S, S-TSS
- How to use enough Mandarin in class
- How to bring your personal touch bringing culture and personal stories or interest
How to use Kahoot
- We use Kahoot as an interactive assessment tool to test the students, best after students learn grammar or when they need a bit of fun to lift up the mood! In general, students love it!
- It takes normally about 10 mins for 10 questions.
- Access to each lesson Kahoot links below, you will need to create your own account to use our Kahoot links.
Book 1A kAHOOT By Lesson
Pinyin KAHOOT by Lesson
How to use quizlet
- Sign up to this course Quizlet class first, you and your students will need to request for full access, headoffice will approve when we receive the email notification.
- Look at the video, learn to use Quizlet functions, especially Live Group Game. It’s competitive and fun! However, it requires a minimum of 4 students to start the game.
- Encourage students to use Quizlet to review words after lesson on the phone. It’s effective and fun!
Games & Activities
- There are games and activities designed to go along with the courses in a goodie bag in the office .
- For Pinyin, we have Spelling Bee for the last lesson.
- For Hanzi, we have two sets of 我有…, 谁有…game.
- For every other lesson, to jazz up the atmosphere, we have 听力抢答 and 惩罚卡.
- For each review lessons, we have worksheets, please ask Learning team for printouts if they are not in the goodie bag already.
- There are also 词汇卡 vocabulary flashcards in the goodie bag for your designed games of charades etc.
Before & After Class
- Ask your student to join your WhatsApp group: “Please join our class WhatsApp group, it’s a study group created for us, I will be sending you learning material lesson by lesson, review podcast after each lesson, and your homework submission would be within the group too. It’s also useful when we need to ask for a leave, running late or need help with opening the door etc. “
- It’s highly recommended to send students homework and the lesson Review Podcasts right after the lesson. Most students wouldn’t necessarily download the podcasts themselves, also it helps students who are absent to make up the lesson. By sending it right after the lesson, it helps the students to create a habit to listen to it. It’s proven to HELP them a lot to retain the words learnt, and listen better.
- We encourage students to submit audio homework at beginner stage. Give them encouragements when they do. As teachers, you will find yourself super proud of their progress each time you hear their homework.
Term start & term end
- For Entry Beginner term start, we’d prepare the books and a name list for the teacher.
- For term end, the graduation test is at the back of the books, you can do that in 20-30mins.
- You can also use the culture experience as a graduation ceremony or ask head office to prepare a little graduation gift for your students.
- We also encourage you to take students out for a graduation meal where your meal will be reimbursed (£20 per class).
- Make sure to make the graduation rather ceremonial, exciting! Take tons of photos and video please!
Understand
Understand the nature of active learning, is always by finding out “why” rather than hearing “why”.
Shift
Teacher shouldn’t be the busy person in the room, time and space should be given to the students to learn, practise and present.
Stand back
Except for tutorial part, most of the other activities should be done by students, become a facilitator, move closer to listen to students and help.
Class Management Tips
Class Dynamics
To warm up a group of strangers in the room, the teacher has to be the facilitator and set the tone.
Class WhatsApp
To maintain students sticking to the class, encourage them to share homework to their WhatsApp group.
Do things Together
The group bonds when they share good times together, learning in class, joining our workshops or going out together.
Trouble Shooting
As beginners, they are full of enthusiasm and curiosity about Chinese language. They have loads and loads of questions regarding vocabulary and grammar points which are due to learn in the future.
Students’ questions are encouraged and welcomed. However, our course is designed systematically regarding the progression of words and grammar points. As the leader of the classroom, you can choose to answer the relevant questions while politely but firmly telling them very soon in the future we will cover the other questions.
Some students are fast learners and very confident to speak out and answer teachers’ questions, while some are slower learners and can be a bit shy to speak.
Try to maintain a balance of time allocated to each student in the classroom. Choose questions suitable for the slower students’ level and ask them to answer them directly. This would help them to build confidence.
Teaching Prep by lesson
Beginner 1 Lesson 1
Beginner 1 Lesson 2
Beginner 1 Lesson 3
Beginner 1 Lesson 4
Beginner 1 Lesson 5
Beginner 1 Lesson 6
Beginner 1 Lesson 7
Beginner 1 Lesson 8
Beginner 1 Lesson 9
Beginner 1 Lesson 10
Demo Lesson Clips
Beginner 1 Lesson 1
The only thing to point out would be – too 1much teacher controlled time, perhaps it’s because it’s online. Teacher could give students a bit more practise time as pair work, so they also get to interact with classmates more. On the other hand, teacher likes to give too small a task, it ends up students will be asked 点名回答 tiny questions too many times.2
Beginner 1 Lesson 2
Beginner 1 Lesson 4
Beginner 1 Lesson 6
Beginner 1 Lesson 4
The only thing to point out would be – time control is not very efficient, it could also be helpful to have some division in styles, teacher-led tutorial (listen to me now), and student-centered practise (pair work, presentations), so the lessons are more tight and well-paced.
Beginner 1 Lesson 4
The very obvious set back in this lessons is – teacher uses too much time to expand to other talking points, at the cost of the training focus. Pinyin training should be about learning and practising the pronunciations, not about learning words. It’s STRONGLY advised not to expand to other new words and grammar at Beginner even Elementary stage. Set the learning focus clearly, so students can achieve small milestones but not puzzled and frustrated by so many unkowns.
The other set back is the outcome of the “child-like” teaching – students will be child like, they are too careful and they will be less independent in practising and thinking. PM’s general approach is quite different. We want to empower our students, by telling them it’s not difficult, you can do it, you can read Pinyin even from Lesson 1, and don’t be afraid of making mistakes.
So we have asked the teacher to adjust her approach lesson by lesson.