To make the Chinese classroom teaching much more interesting, many teachers of the qualified Mandarin program created many teaching approaches. Here we will talk about three classroom practices to help students who learn Chinese in China to make themselves master of Chinese speech sounds.
The teacher from the Chinese school in China suggests to playing card games. Teacher prepares the initial consonant and final cards of Chinese pinyin. The teacher gives the initial consonant cards to the boys and the final cards to the girls. Then the teacher gives away the monosyllable cards. For example, the pinyin of“红”should be spelled out by the student who is holding the corresponding initial consonant card and the one who is holding the corresponding final card. The one who can show the cards properly within one second will get one score and the one who shows the cards overtime or wrongly will be taken off one score. And after the practice ends, students who are learning Mandarin Chinese should announce their own scores.
Firstly, this skill can allow teachers find the proficiency and the weakness of students to the disassembling of pinyin when they learn to speak Chinese. Secondly, the Chinese pinyin cards can be made by the teacher himself. The cards can be either big or small and painted different colors to show the initial consonants and finals. Thirdly, the speed of the practice should be high and the quantity should be much. After five rounds, students who learn Mandarin can exchange their cards. The teacher should prepare the pronunciation sequential list before the class.
The purpose of this practice is to cultivate the ability of students who study Chinese in recognizing syllables, analyzing initial consonants and finals.
The other teacher has another good teaching approach to both practice and examine the proficiency of students who in pinyin tones. Teacher gives the students who study in China the printed exercises with 20 disyllables. Firstly, teacher reads syllables and students are required to write down the tone marks on the syllable cards read by the teacher; then the teacher check the students’ answers by asking questions. For example, the teacher asks the first one and the student answers tongzhi 3, 4 (the third tone or the fourth tone). After checking, the second step can be started: the teacher reads the syllables and asks students to examine whether the pinyin on the cards are accordant with the one that the teacher has read from No. 20 backwards No. 1 in turn. If they are accordant, students should write “√” and if they are not, they should write a “×”. For example, the teacher reads syllables as following:
(20) jì niàn (19) jiǎng huà (18) xīn qíng
(17) gòng xiàn (16) liáng xí (15) wài jiāo …
The students write on the cards like the following:
(20) jīn nián (×) (19) jián fǎ(×) (18) xīn qíng (√)
(17) kōng qián (×) (16) liàn xí(×) (15) huá qiáo(×)…
After the first step is finished, teachers should correct the tone marks that the students wrongly wrote when examining the answers so that the second step can be started.
This practice aims to help students who learn Mandarin in China to recognize Chinese pinyin tones and differentiate the similar syllables.
The author has a good suggestion for teachers to help students who learn Chinese language in China to correct their pronunciation mistakes. Teacher chooses a piece of dialogue and asks students to work in pairs and practice. During the process, teacher records their dialogue practice and then plays the records for the whole class. Record of every group will be judged by and pointed out the advantages and disadvantages by other students. After one or two months, teacher records the practice of the same dialogue again and plays the records to students. Then teacher analyzes the records to see whether the students have had progress and what kind of problems still exists.The three above teaching approaches have been practiced by our experienced teachers and they were proved to be quite useful and effective. Many students like these teaching methods, for the atmosphere of classroom are made lively and interesting. And they can easily memorize the knowledge learnt in class and make the usage of the knowledge more proficient.