To practice overseas students’ ability of describing and expressing with Chinese, this lesson will help students who study in China by some methods and games related to picturing.

In order to train students’ ability of listening, describing and practicing with Chinese. The first method teacher can use in Chinese language school is the game “I say you draw”.

Firstly, divide the whole class into several groups and each group send two students to play the game. When the game begins, teacher hands out several prepared pictures to the players who are responsible for reading the pictures. To study Chinese by this way, they should describe the pictures to their partners in Chinese and the partners will draw the pictures according to the description.

The students who take the responsibility to draw the pictures can ask questions about the contents in Chinese, but not allowed to look at the pictures. In order to encourage students to learn Chinese language, teacher should make some comments to the pictures and give a mark when finishing them in limited time.

With the purpose of helping students, teacher can teach Mandarin language by changing the playing ways. It can be played by teacher starting with a word and asking two students to draw on the blackboard to see who can complete firstly. The others draw on the paper and comments will be made by teacher or students. When teacher makes comments on the pictures, the attention should be paid to the students’ ability to express and understand, but not that of drawing pictures.

Another training approach related to pictures is “listening, picturing and discussing”. In Mandarin learning courses, this method is designed to help students obtain information with their communicative competence, thus consolidating the language contents just learned.

If you attend to school to study Mandarin, the teacher will play the game by firstly giving you a picture after learning a new language content, for instance, “我的房间”, in which only doors and windows are provided. Students are supposed to supplement the left things in accordance with the tape.

After finishing the pictures, students should be divided into several groups to make some comparison and comments on the pictures and describe the differences.

It is important for teacher to tell the students that it is doesn’t matter to draw the pictures good or bad. What really matters is that the pictures can be recognized. To increase students’ confidence to learn Chinese in China, teacher can draw some furniture on the blackboard as examples, but do not draw so perfect.

The description and discussion between students should be a kind of real communicative activity. Therefore, it can’t be processed as a show which is artificial. To enrich the contents for students to learn Mandarin, the picturing targets can be “我们的学校”, “小卖部”, “邮局”, “饭馆”, etc.

In order to train students’ reading comprehension ability and capability of expressing by paragraph, teacher can practice students by explaining according to the pictures.

In some fragments of the intensive reading, students can draw a simple picture and describe it on the basis of reading comprehension. For example, in the beginning part of《亡人轶事》in《中级汉语教程》, people come from different places are mentioned and described mostly by dialogue, which may be difficult for students to study Chinese.

Let’s take a look at the playing steps in Mandarin language courses in China. Firstly, teacher demands students to read some literary contents and then students should draw a simple picture according to their own understanding. When finished, teacher can choose one or two students to draw on the blackboard and explain the whole process of the story. After discussing, teacher will ask students to the blackboard to tell the story according to the pictures on the basis of understanding.

In the whole procedure, students always play the leading role, but teacher must act dominantly. And the most important thing to teach Mandarin language is to enlighten and guide students to understand correctly. for example, teacher can ask what is the difference among “给谁家说亲去来”, “给谁家说亲来” and “给谁家说亲去”.

The three methods discussed above are all related to drawing a picture. Therefore, we can see how important is for students to learn Chinese with the help of pictures.