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Incorporating Real Life Experiences into the Language Classroom
Incorporating authentic materials, such as restaurant menus, bus passes, and paintings into the Chinese language classroom is a highly effective method to help students gain a tangible understanding of the target language and culture. However, these authentic materials are limited in scope and cannot produce the same results as a real life, authentic experience of language and culture.
Accordingly, at China Institute, wherever possible we incorporate into our language programs practical, real world scenarios, through which students can become immersed in the target culture and use the target language, thus providing our students a critically important opportunity to apply and enhance their language skills in a culturally engaging environment.
We do this also in the knowledge that the “Communities” standard, according to ACTFL’s “five C” foreign language learning standards, is often the most challenging for Chinese language teachers to meet. Real world, practical experiences can help teachers better meet this standard, and effectively guide students to apply their Chinese language skills in an unconventional educational setting. This type of learning will require Chinese language teachers to think beyond his/her language classroom walls and reach out to the community, utilizing any available resources in order to achieve an immersive learning experience for the students.
The above video, “Surviving Chinatown,” is one example of how the program administrators and teachers of the China Institute-STARTALK Summer Language Academy effectively integrated life experiences into our students’ learning process. For this particular field trip, the curriculum focused on the unit topic “Directions.” The delivery of the unit was broken down into three parts:
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Classroom practice to introduce the vocabulary and sentence structures, as well as the culture;
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A field trip experience to practice the language learned; and
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A follow-up classroom discussion to finalize and reinforce the content.
In order to bring excitement to the learning process, the program administrators and teachers named the field trip “Surviving Chinatown” in order to echo the popular reality TV program “Survivor”. The challenge of the “Surviving Chinatown” field trip was to go to Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, divide students in small groups and assign tasks related to the unit topic, “Directions”. Students were required to complete the tasks in Mandarin Chinese within a limited amount of time. Each group was given a hand-held flip video camera or a digital recorder to document their “survival” experience. The groups were required to present their videos the next day in class and to share their experience during the field trip.
The tasks for the field trip were not given out until the day of the field trip, which immediately brought the class into a “survival” mode. All the conversations that the students tried to make with the local Chinese people were spontaneous, which was the perfect opportunity for the students to bring their classroom knowledge alive, in a real world experience. The excitement reflected on the students’ faces after accomplishing a task made it clear they had gained the confidence necessary to succeed, ultimately reinforcing the teachers’ assessment of the students’ progress. Through this real life experience, the students gained a much deeper understanding, enhanced enthusiasm and boosted confidence in their journey of learning the Chinese language and culture. In subsequent interviews with, and surveys of, the students they were extremely enthusiastic about this approach, which they felt deepened and reinforced their learning, while at the same time making the learning process fun and engaging.
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