Interactivity & Moodle tools

Initial situation

Unlike the writing systems of the Indo-European alphabetic languages, Chinese writing is not phonetically transparent; each character, known as morpho-syllabic, must be learned both for its meaning and its pronunciation. The Moodle teaching platform and, more generally, information and communication technologies now make it possible to relegate pinyin, the system of phonetic transcription in Latin letters of Chinese dating from the late 1950s, to the background. The scripting of the ChineWeb project, and thus of the exercises created on Moodle, has from the outset provided for strategies to overcome this sound barrier between oral and written, by systematically proposing, in the quizzes, the corresponding audio recordings, either in the question or as a proofreading.

In face-to-face classes, rather than a theoretical course, the teaching emphasizes the oral practice of Chinese, the reading and written reception being done in a second time, once the vocabulary and the syntax of the lesson in progress are mastered orally. To do this, the teacher puts the students’ discussion at the center of her course with the objective that the students master as quickly as possible the syntactic structures of Chinese, which are very different from French.

Project implementation

The pedagogical will is to make the students talk as much as possible during the sessions. They are invited to dialogue together on the proposed themes. They can ask questions to ask for help to one of their classmates or to a Chinese student present during the session. This approach forces students to be active and involved during the class, they can be asked questions by another student at any time.

While the students interact, the teacher stands back and lets them help and correct each other. She transcribes elements of the discussions in writing and projects them to the students in the word processor of the Wenlin electronic dictionary, with the final text appearing only in Chinese characters. The focus is on sentences in different contexts, with supports (objects, images, gestures) introduced progressively to introduce vocabulary and illustrate syntactic structures and functions. The dictionary also allows for easy phonetic correction in case of doubt about pronunciation.

When something new is introduced or when students are having difficulty, the teacher intervenes to present the nuances of the variations of structures and sentence forms. The teacher corrects and corrects when necessary, explaining the students’ pronunciation errors and their possible alternative meanings. Frequently, all students are asked to pronounce the sentences faster and faster.

At the same time, the teacher makes available on Moodle many resources for students in the flipped classroom. In particular, she has set up self-correcting audio quizzes. Priority is given to writing the characters on the computer, even if comprehension is also tested by MCQs. Students can practice on their own at home, and only the best of their attempts are counted in the final tests of the continuous assessment.

Thoughts and advice

Putting students at the center of class sessions requires an excellent command of the subject. You have to be able to adapt to the feedback and be prepared to answer many more questions than in a traditional teaching session. This greater investment is rewarded by more active and motivated students.

The use of self-correcting audio quizzes on Moodle is appreciated by the students. The follow-up and integration of the quizzes in the final evaluation of the course that Moodle allows allows the teacher to ensure the regularity of the work done by the students.

It should be noted, however, that the creation of exercises is very time-consuming for the teacher, particularly because of the large number of resources required, and also because certain updates to the platform require updates to each question in the quizzes. Since Moodle 2, the resources (audio, mp4, images etc.) are also difficult to retrieve once they have been placed on the platform, they are no longer visually available in a particular register, for example. It therefore takes on average between 3 and 5 min to create ONE Moodle lambda question of the cloze type (an image, an audio or a video, a choice of possible answers in the two Chinese writing systems RPC and TW, some Chinese characters not being recognized in Unicode, such as punctuation, for example, etc). This “technical” time does not include researching or creating original documents for the exercises.

Student feedback

“A lot of speaking motivates the students because we can see the evolution and allows them to assimilate the grammar points in an “automatic” way. “The strengths are:] Oral: each person has to speak and this helps to improve their own pronunciation. The tests: one test per week forces the student to revise and therefore to continue practicing writing and grammar. The translations from French to Chinese: they represent a final test in the sense that they show us if the student has understood the grammar or not.” “This workshop offers us the learning of modern Chinese. One of the strong points of this TP/workshop lies in a step by step learning, first of the vocabulary, then of the grammatical structure. Then, as it is a new language, speaking can sometimes be confusing, but the fact that we speak, repeat, listen without taking notes the first sessions is beneficial for the student’s ear as well as for his oral comprehension. Moreover, the different learning processes are introduced progressively, so that by the end of the first semester, the student has studied vocabulary and semantic keys, written characters and has already mastered basic oral skills.”