Qian Liu, Xiaoying Yu, Asian Languages and Cultures | 2022-2023
With the continuous growth of Chinese language education, students in our advanced-level classrooms have been showing increasing diversity in terms of their language proficiency, educational and cultural background and learning goals. This diversity not only brought new dynamics into the classroom, but also new challenges to our daily teaching and educational models.
As instructors, we respect and value the uniqueness of each student, and hope for them to use their unique strengths to achieve their full potential. Our teaching goal has always been not only to improve students’ Chinese language proficiency, but also offer opportunities for them to utilize the language skills to enhance their academic interests and advantages. However, traditional course content and teaching mode cannot offer the level of student-centered differentiated learning our students need and deserve.
With this grant, we will transform the existing teaching content from knowledge-based fixed text to essential skills demanded in the real working setting a. And design flexible task-based learning activities with different focus on language aspects and difficulty levels. The teaching mode for the new content will be highly interactive and dynamic, which means that students will be involved in the decision making from the learning content to the details of their learning activities. By combining multiple innovative pedagogies, we will be able to build this flexible, stimulating, interactive and inclusive classroom environment to provide students with differentiated teaching. In this way, students can not only learn the essential most needed language skills, but also develop their communication and cultural awareness, teamwork ability, and problem-solving skills, etc. during the process. We are confident that this approach is not only an effective solution to the above-mentioned challenges in daily teaching practice, but could also be also a pilot model of student-centered differentiated language education in the future.