1. Hongni Gou, Qiuwen Pu, Yingliang He
Mini Project #2
Vocabulary and Reading：
Computer-assisted Learning of Chinese Idioms
Hongni Gou, Qiuwen Pu, Yingliang He

2. Teaching Context
College level Chinese class in a North American university
Target student: undergraduate students minoring in Chinese
Student level: intermediate high
Class size: 10
Course length: one semester
CALL Activity: Course Project

3. Learning Objectives To learn Chinese idioms that have story origins
To use Chinese idioms in appropriate contexts
To cultivate students’ CALL-related self-learning ability
To know more about Chinese history and culture
To get immersed in reading, which could further improve reading comprehension and incidental learning

4. Technical Prerequisites
Technical requirements
Internet access, a laptop / a desktop with recording device
Teachers’ and learners’ technical proficiency
PPT making
Basic searching skills
Corpus searching
Online audio-recording
Use of social network interface

5. Task Description
Use of Trackstar for general instructions

6. Task Description Step 1: Signup a Chinese Idiom
Step 2: Read the story, and summarize it
Step 3: Check the pronunciation and meaning
Step 4: Search a video related to your Chinese Idiom on YouTube. Copy and paste the url
Step 5: Record your own pronunciation of the Chinese Idiom (using Vocaroo)
Step 6: Go to CCL Corpus, search for example sentences (context & collocation)
Step 7: Make up their own sentence
Step 8: Locate one short episode of text where your Chinese Idiom is used in the context
Step 9: Make “Step 3-8” into PPT and post it on Yammer
Step 10: Read through and comment on peers‘ posts, then make up one sentence for every Chinese Idiom that your peers share in the current week, post the sentences on the “reply” box

7. Task Description
Interface of Yammer

8. Theoretical Consideration
Sociocultural Theory
ZPD
Scaffolding
Mediation

9. Pedagogical Consideration
Why idioms?
Student’s needs, Chinese culture and history.
Why story materials?
Learning sequence: from literal to figurative meaning.
Why modified material bank?
Student fit
Why idiom PPT?
Multimodality and multimedia

10. Pedagogical Consideration
Why Trackstar?
Scaffolding guideline, vocabulary trip
Why Yammer?
Learning community, share, discuss and feedback.
Why corpus and extended reading?
Authentic materials, contextualization

11. Sustainability

12. Encouragement of learning strategies
Self learning: individual task with given guideline
Difficulty control of the material bank: modified to fit students’ current level
Learning community: represent, share and discuss with peers and teachers
Multimodality: appropriate employment of text, video, audio-recording
Feedback: in-time comments from peers and teachers
Verbalization: making sentence with the idiom they’ve learned.
Potential learning ability: extended reading.

13. Evaluation 1. Language learning potential
Primarily communicative, meaning-focused activities
Story – meaning
Occasional or incidental focus on linguistic form
Reading
Sentence making
Communicating on Yammer

14. Evaluation learners' social identity Yammer cultural awareness
2. Positive impact
learners' social identity
Yammer
cultural awareness
Chinese Idiom
pragmatic abilities
Sentence making
computer literacy
PPT(searching, recording)

15. Evaluation
3. Learner fit (it enables individual learners to work with):
Language structures at the appropriate level
modified story
Learner characteristics such as motivation, age, gender, and learning style
social network
PPT

16. Evaluation 4. Authenticity
Correspondence between the CALL activity and target-language activities of interest/needs to learners out of the classroom
YAMMER
Literacy
Dictionary
CORPUS

17. Evaluation 5. Practicality Hardware and software technical support
Social and cultural characteristics of the institutional environment (learners' diverse backgrounds profile and enrich their identities)
technology-friendly

18. Evaluation
More practice
Follow-up assessment