How to Teach Listening and Speaking in Mandarin Essay

Design a audition speaking caper. You need to clarify the level of the students (e.g. how many an(prenominal) hours they have learnt Chinese, how many characters they have mastered, etcetera), the purposes of the exercises, how you atomic number 18 going to operate these exercises and the reasons why you design and operate the t carry like this.In the t each(prenominal)ing of spoken voice communication, the views of comprehending went by dint of different phases. Earlier views considered listening as the mastery of discrete skills such as recognizing cohesive structure in texts or identifying key manner of speaking in a text etc. Later views introduced the notions of bottom-up and top-down processing and emphasized the grandness of prior knowledge and schema in comprehension. At the same time, the understanding of the role of the listener develop into current views which throw outs his/her active participation in listening, applying strategies to assist, monitor and evalua te his/her own listening. (J. C. Richards, 2008)Speaking takes place in real time, its produced in response to the speech of the person we talk to. This shows its contingent nature. In verbiage teaching, speaking ability increases along with the learners other abilities in the foreign/second language such as vocabulary, listening skill, knowledge of culture etc. mandarin orange is a spoken language, so its learning process is also in line with general rules of language learning/teaching. However, as Mandarin has unique features as a language system, which includes five tones and changing tones in certain circumstances, its of import to take these features into consideration while designing a listening speaking task. The interest is a listening speaking task I tried to design for Mandarin teaching.Listening speaking Task surmount Sheet conviction 50 minutes (2 sessions)Class Level Later Beginners to Lower Intermediate master(prenominal) AimsBy the end of the lesson, the learne rs exit be able to1. Grasp pickle voice communication and Place Expressions.2. effect listening to gist and details.3. bespeak for directions and ask questions politely.Subsidiary Aims1. Improve reading skill.2. Group/pair co subroutineAssumptionsThe learners already had knowledge of Location Words and Place Expressions from Lesson 8, which will suspensor their comprehension of the listening material.Anticipated Problems1. Students efficacy be confused with the direction words.2. Form how to ask questions.3. Pronunciation tones and intonation of some words.Class inditeThe students are 12 adults who come to study in the evening. They have one lesson every week which lasts 2 hours. Some of them travel to China for business trips. The text book they use is Contemporary Chinese I (2003). Theyve spent roughly 60 hours so far to learn Mandarin. They have a expert reign of 325 Chinese words and expressions, 244 Chinese characters, 22 grammar items and 23 communicative, thus have a basic program line of Mandarin.Timetable FitThe students have learnt in lesson 8 about circumspection Words and Places Expressions. This lesson intends to provide them a find out to use the words in real situations. After the lesson, students will be given a cartoon symbolize to practise at home by using these direction words to describe how to function from one place to another. In the next lesson, some students will tell the class about their homework.Materials1. A self- intentional conversation based on Lesson 8 of Contemporary Chinese I.2. A live activity intentional by the author.Exercise I How can they get to the Summer Palace?Time 20-30 minutes endeavor Listening for gist and details. Review what the students learnt in Lesson 8 in the textbook about Location Words and Place Expressions.Preparation A tape recorder with the following conversation. ? ? () ? 379332 ? ? Procedure 1. Give students an exercise sheet, with following questions.(A) True or falsetmn xing zhdo znme q yhyuna. ()yhyun b yunb. ()(B) response the following questionsa. Can they get to the Summer Palace by taking bus 379?b. Which direction should they pull to get to the Summer Palace by and by leaving the bus? c. Why cant they go to the Summer Palace by bike?2. Explain to the students that the conversation is about asking for direction, and look back the Location Words and Place Expressions of Lesson 8, provide the new vocabulary Summer Palace (). 3. Play the tape once, ask the students to do the exercise sheet. 4. Go through the questions, let the students discuss if their answers are different from each other. 5. charter the students to pay to a greater extent attention to some of the details related to their answers. Play the tape again. 6. Go through the questions again, give the right answers. 7. Tell the students that they are going to give details about the direction by and by the listening, so crap notes if necessary. Play the tape for third time. 8. Ask students to work as a sort out to give details of direction so you can draw a map on the jump on to show how to get to the Summer Palace. 9. Check the answer by listening to the tape again.Reasons for the design and operation of this exercise This exercise is designed to provide an opportunity for the students to use all-round skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing. By swelled tasks in steps, students will gradually understand the listening material to a thorough extent. This will hopefully enable them to use what they learnt in a fluent way.Exercise II Guest speaker (G White, 1998, P52)Time 5 minutes in one session, 15-20 minutes in the next sessionPurpose To listen for gist and details to give the students the experience of listening as an audience.Preparation 1. The teacher dresses up as a Guest speaker.2. The Guest Speaker writes a brief note for the class, giving a fewer details about interesting places he has been to. The note can be completely fictitio us to make it more fun. E.g. 2005 I went to the Moon for a holidayProcedure 1. Hand out the copies of the note to the class, ready the students in pairs, and ask each pair to think of one question they would like the Speaker to answer. then the students choose the best 4 questions to be written down. The teacher/the Speaker should not know these questions. 2. Ask the students to think of a list of topics for the Speaker which will be most likely to produce the answers to the questions. publish the topics down. e.g. transportation, places etc.3. Give the list of topics to the Speaker. These will provide guidelines for him in preparing the talk. If the Speaker can develop some photographs or slides during his talk, itll be more interesting. 4. With the students, practise polite ways of asking questions. Also review vocabulary related to touring and food etc. 5. In the next session, the Speaker gives his talk. The students should listen to see if their questions are answered. 6. I f some of the questions have not been answered in the talk, the students could ask the Speaker in a question-and-answer session after the talk.7. After the Q&A session, go through the questions with the students and check the answers.Reasons for the design and operation of this exercise This exercise is designed with the intention to train the students to listen to a live talk, as well as speaking spontaneously. To help the students to achieve the best result from this exercise, in the pre-listening phase, the teacher prepares the students for both top-down and bottom-up processing through activities involving handing out the note, reviewing vocabulary, making predictions (preparing the list of topics) and familiarizing the polite ways of asking questions (so to create a more natural language environment).During the talk, students therefore can listen for comprehension by gist listening, selective listening, sequencing etc. In the post-listening phase, questions are asked by the stu dents to elicit answers, and then answers are checked to ensure that students have good comprehension of the talk. This exercise also encourages the students to work together by discussing what questions they want to ask and how to decide the topics accordingly after deciding the questions. This provides a good chance for students to practise words and phrases they grasped so far, especially Direction Words and Places Expressions.Homework At the end of lesson, give each student a sketch map with banks, post office, bus station, and a park on it. Divide students into three groups, each group will be given a task to describe how to get somewhere from a place. Next lesson, each group will have one student come to the front to tell the whole class. This is to encourage further use of Direction Words and Places Expressions.ReferencesJ C Richards (2008), Teaching Listening and Speaking From guess to Practice, Cambridge University Press http//www.cambridge.org/elt/teacher-support/pdf/Rich ards-Teaching-Listening-Speaking.pdfG. White (1998) Listening, Oxford University PressZhongwei Wu (2003) Contemporary Chinese I, Sinolingua