angry bird and Chinese Language

have been playing angry birds since gotten my droid last oct, and am always impressed by the many physics within. chanced upon this post “Using Angry Birds to teach math, history and science“, and i thought why not let’s have a list for “Using Angry Birds to teach Chinese Language”, and here’s some powder and smoke:

课前必备条件Pre-requisite:
– 学生必须玩过angry birds,否则教师可想方设法让学生在课上,或课后玩过angry birds

听说 Listening-Speaking
– 让学生听不同版本的angry birds 音乐、或音效,然后让他们回忆并复述该音乐、音效属于游戏的哪个部分并象征什么意义 (听、说)
– 让学生假扮销售员,当堂兜售angry birds游戏,说服观众为什么一定要玩angry birds (说)
– 可让其他学生复述上述活动中,同学所说的内容,同时锻炼听和说的能力 (听、说)
– 让学生辩论angry birds及其他受欢迎的游戏,例如Mega jump、Fruit Ninja等。
– 若要配合ICT,上述活动可配合audioblog, podcast, 任何录音平台,甚至是VoiceThread、Glogster等进行

读写 Reading-Writing
– 制定阅读有关angry birds的篇章,并配合阅读微技的训练,设计理解问答
– 让学生上网搜寻有关angry birds的文章,例如游戏指南,玩后感等,然后写一篇综合报告,整理并总结所见到的内容
– 让学生写一封电邮或一篇说明文,介绍angry birds游戏及其玩法,或是闯关秘笈walkthrough
– 让学生写一篇记叙文,述说一次和亲友一起玩angry birds相关的经历
– 让学生假设本校将主办一次玩angry birds游戏的比赛,写邀请函邀请参赛,或给赞助商赞助活动
– 若要配合ICT,上述活动可配合blog, wiki, discussion forum, linoit等进行
– 除了独自进行活动,也可让学生分组进行协作学习collaborative learning (CoL)

感觉好像还可以衍生很多其他的活动,改次再写吧 😛

ShiJie HanYu JiaoXue, the long awaited

today i received in my SNAIL mailbox FOUR copies of 《世界汉语教学》 (Chinese Teaching in the World). the journey of getting our article 《以元认知为主导信息科技为辅的口语教学模式探索》 (A Metacognitive and Information Technology Integrated Approach to Teaching Speaking in Chinese Language) has been a long one. it was first submitted in march 2008, after 2 reviews, it’s finally published! my first attempt at getting an article published in an international recognised blind-refereed journal (:

the article is an abridged version of my MA research, so if you would like to find out more, i would suggest you go here 🙂

Citation:
Tan, Y.H., Tan S.C., & Teo, E.H. (2009). A metacognitive and information technology integrated approach to teaching speaking in Chinese language. Chinese Teaching in the World, 23(4), 519-534.

陈育焕、陈成志、张永慧. 以元认知为主导信息科技为辅的口语教学模式探索 [J]. 世界汉语教学, 2009, 23(4), 519-534.

graduation, ma thesis, AUDIOblogs

nearly 1 month ago, 20th june marks the day that i’m officially graduated from my (1st) MA course and this is the envelope that flew all the way from singapore:

besides sharing the joy, here’s my research for sharing:
Title:
An Exploratory Study on a Metacognitive Approach to Teaching and Learning of Spontaneous Speaking in Chinese Language with Audioblogs
Keywords:
chinese language, speaking, audioblogs, metacognition, language learning, language teaching, educational technology, weblog, edublog, 华文, 口语教学,元认知,博客,信息科技,有声博客
Summary:

Language learning involves four areas, namely listening, speaking, reading
and writing. This study focuses on speaking, an area that is often neglected by
teachers for various reasons. In many Chinese Language classrooms, which are
teacher-centered by tradition, students have minimal opportunities to actively
participate in the negotiation of meaning during lesson. To develop students to
become independent learners of speaking in Chinese Language, a metacognitive
framework developed by Goh and Zhang (2002) was adopted in this study. Twenty-five
Secondary Two Express stream Chinese Language students, aged 13 to 14,
participated in this eight weeks study. Audioblogs was used as the mediating
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool through which the students
interacted as they developed their metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
awareness. Through the use of scaffolding questions, the students carried out self-appraisals to evaluate and monitor their oral performances and planned for their
future speaking tasks. The students were also tasked to provide comments for peers’ oral performances. Seven usable sets of data were analysed and based on inferential
statistics, the treatment may have led the students to improve significantly in their
pretest-posttest oral performance scores. Through peer commenting and self-appraisal
activities in the audioblogs, the students developed greater metacognitive
knowledge and metacognitive awareness.

and here’s the thesis in PDF format. you may need to grab acrobat reader 8 or above to read the content.
and last but not least, i would like to thank the following friends once again, as without their help and encouragement, this research would not have been possible:
Dr Tan Seng Chee (my sup), Dr Christine Goh C.M., Mr. Lim Sing Gee, Mdm. Tan Hiok Keng, Mdm. Ho Fui Ling, Ms. Hoe Joe Hwee and Mr. Amos Goh Yoong Shin, Mr. Darren Anthonio Marino Nonis, Mr. John Ow Eu Gene, Ms. Jeanne Marie Ho Pau Yuen and Dr. Chua Guat Kheng. and last but not least yh2, yh3 and yh4 🙂

Podcast Generator

i think this could be the solution if you have a webspace but how to ‘stock’ your podcasts and generate the feeds for subscription? need to try it myself, in the meantime:

Podcast Generator is a free PHP script released under GPL that lets users upload media files via a web form and automatically create rss 2.0 w3c-compliant podcast feeds. It also features a web administration and a dynamic web page displaying new podcasts.