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The Principles of Designing Classroom Activities

In the classroom Chinese teaching as a foreign language, many teaching activities should be held to help students study Chinese better. At the same time, teachers should obey some basic principles when designing classroom activities. There are three basic principles should be obeyed, namely, interactivity, purposefulness and operability.

The interaction means teachers and students affect each other. The classroom interaction is designed for solving a certain problems effectively or deepening students’ understanding and experience about what they have learned. Therefore, teachers in Chinese language school should carefully design the teaching activities to reach this goal. It is not proper that teachers perform and students receive negatively in the classroom. On the contrary, it is a stage that both of them exchange and communicate with each other.

About the interaction in classroom teaching, teachers should pay attention to several aspects when they teach Mandarin language. First of all, the ways of interaction should be diverse such as between teachers and students, students and students as well as the desk mates and so on. It could be questioning, debating, discussing, performing, contesting and gaming and so on. Besides, during the interaction, teachers should give students proper positive evaluation to strengthen their learning confidence.

In addition, the forms of the seats should be helpful for the interaction among students. According to different activities characteristics, teaching requirements and students’ interest, the setting of the tables and chairs should be changed accordingly. Some forms often used in learning Mandarin Chinese are sitting in circle, in lines, clearing the platform and free combination. By this various forms of interaction, the close communication between teachers and students or between students will be realized.

The last point is that there is no fixed answer in the interaction. During the process of interacting, all kinds of answers are allowed. In this way, students can develop their imagination and creation to learn Chinese language. As a result, the teaching contents will be deepened and more diverse. Then they can apply the knowledge they learned to different kinds of contexts.

In brief, the interaction in classroom teaching is important. It is a platform to learn Mandarin by ways of cooperating and discussing and exploring. However, the interaction should be established on the foundation of equal, democratic and friendly relationship between teachers and students, thus promoting students develop initiatively and in an all-round way.

The second important principle in designing classroom activities is the purposefulness. Teachers should have clear and specific purposes of the classroom activities. For examples, they should consider what kind of language forms should be trained and what kind of communicative ability and other skills should be cultivated. What’s more, teachers should also consider the forms of arranging classroom activities. All of these should be taken into consideration when designing and let students know clearly when they study Mandarin Chinese.

The last but not least principle is the operability. In order to realize the operability of the classroom teaching activities, teachers in Mandarin learning courses should following the following three points. Firstly, it should be simplified in the forms. If the designed teaching activities need a lot of instruments and various scenes and places, it will take more time and more energy to do the preparation. As a result, extra unnecessary burden is added. Then, teachers will fail to finish the regular teaching activities.

One important point teachers should pay attention is the time. Teachers should have a careful design about the time needed to complete a certain teaching activity. If the time is too long, it will affect the regular teaching process. On the contrary, the less time will fail to reach the expected result. When teachers design the time, they should assume every student will be involved. About the activity contents, it would be better to center on the familiar contents. If the students are familiar with the contents that are closely related to their life, it will encourage their initiative to learn Mandarin Chinese.

The three principles mentioned above are just some basic principles should be considered when designing the classroom activity. In the specific and practical process, teaches should do relevant adjustment according to the conditions of the students who learn to speak Chinese. But the overall principle is to make the classroom a place for Chinese communication but not only the place for teachers’ performance.

All in all, teachers should take the three basic principles into consideration when they design the classroom activities. By following these principles, teachers will reach the teaching goals easier. 

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