Poem Study (3): Be a Poet!

It doesn’t matter when do you want to do this, but finally, you would love your students to write their own poems in Chinese. It may sounds a little bit crazy at this point, since your students probably can not even make complete sentences in Chinese. Don’t worry, my students do not really know how to make complete sentences at this time either, however, you may be impressed by some of their poems! Remember, the most important thing for them is not to speak perfect Chinese, but to experience, and enjoy learning Chinese. Here I’ll let you know how I did it.

I really appreciate the teacher’s guide for A Thousand Peaks: Poems from China, a picture book introduces and collects Chinese poems and includes their translations, written by Siyu Liu and Orel Protopopescu. I don’t have the book, but I got the teacher’s guide online and I feel it is really helpful. From a teacher’s point of view, it gives the idea on how to teach poem as well as teach the language. The guide starts with an introduction on Chinese poem’s history, structure and wording etc., and followed by a series of instructions on how to guide students writing their own poems. As suggested in the guide, the way to scaffold students is providing the pattern of a poem as shown in the following chart:

Adjective Noun Verb Connecting Word Noun
Adjective Noun Verb Connecting Word Noun
Verb Noun Connecting Word Adjective Noun
Verb Noun Connecting Word Adjective Noun

One type of Chinese poem is composed of four sentences, and five characters in each line. In order to make it easier, the pattern has fixed properties for each character. On the next page of the guide, the authors provide four lists of English words that fall into each of the categories. I didn’t really read through the instruction on how to do this activity from the guide, while just by looking at these two charts, I fostered the idea in my head to let my students pick up words from the lists and compose their own poems. While just finishing the poem in English with a Chinese pattern is obviously not enough. Since we just introduced the origin of Chinese characters from our previous lessons, I wish the students could design their own characters according to their imaginations. So in the end, what I expected from the students were “looking like but not really” Chinese poems.

I talked about this idea with one of my colleagues, or my mentor, and I indicated that my concern was if this activity was too difficult for my students, and what if they told me that they had no idea how to design their own characters. I know my students well, that no matter how interesting I think one activity is, there must be some of them think it is boring and too hard for them to finish. The suggestion from my mentor really inspired me a lot and made me feel confident that this activity would work well. He told me that I could bring my students outside and let them feel the nature while they were writing the poems. I think it was a great idea since students could look around and get inspiration from the nature about how they want to design their characters, since anyway, it was how the ancient people created the characters in a real case from thousands of years ago.

Here are the steps that you can follow to adopt this activity:

1. Bring your students to the outside, and ask them to look around and relax;
2. Follow the pattern, ask your students to pick up words from the lists to finish their poems
3. Ask students to design characters for each word, and put them onto the “rice” paper (image 1) as their final work (they need to write from right to left, and top to bottom, like ancient people!)
4. Share their poems in the class

image 1

image 2

By providing the lists of words, I put Chinese translations (Pinyin) on the side (image 2). However, for some of the words I left them blank since there are more than one translation in Chinese for that specific words, and it depends on the context of the whole poem to select the best one. For example the word “dying” from the category of “Verbs” could be translated into “逝 (shi)” or “灭 (mie)” in Chinese depending on different situations. Therefore, I asked my students to come to me whenever they chose words like those. Also, I asked my students to put their final works in an ancient way (writing vertically). I always remind me that the most important thing for students who are learning a foreign language in this age are more like experiencing new things and having fun than studying something seriously! So this is one part of it! And if you also like it, try it!

Student Work

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. Some of the word might be too abstract for students to design a character for, so you may want to show them how we write it nowadays to give them a hint.
2. Some of my students said they didn’t want to design their own characters and just want to copy the real Chinese characters instead. You may talk about this in advance, to set your expectation and how do you want to deal the case like this.

Poem Study (2): Task Challenges for Groups and Having Fun

image from internet

When I am thinking about classroom activities, I am always thinking about having fun. I think that would be even boring for the teacher to teach if the activities are not fun at all. However, it is always difficult to think about an activity which is both interesting and educational. Plus, the students are hard to be satisfied as well. For me, I feel it is both exciting and risky to launch a brand new activity in class. But anyway, I enjoy the exciting part, and I hope you do too.

Group working works really well for my class. You may find this activity fit you or your class the best if you are also a type of teacher who doesn’t really have loud voice, and needs to clear your throat from time to time. I am a quiet person, and I am tired of yelling at students, so I took some time to figure out a best way for both my students and I. It turned out that group working the best way until now, since it not only provides a chance for students to talk and participate more, but also a chance for me to spend time working with each students and making sure that they understand what is going on during classes.

As I introduced in my last blog, the textbook that we use includes several poems along with the learning of characters. The second poem we worked on was In the Quiet Night (静夜思) by Bai Li (李白). I remember when I taught the first poem, one of my students asked me why they needed to learn the poems. She was even a little bit resistant that time and refused to learn. It was actually a great question that I had never thought about. I learned poems from very little when I was educated to be literate and I never doubted how the poems could help with my Chinese learning. I guess the easier part for me to learn and memorize those poems than the American students was that I had already known how to speak in Chinese during that time, and the only challenge for me was a limited number of new words that I had never heard about. But still, I learn new words and characters through the rhythm of poems. I told the students that learning poem was a way to help you build up your Chinese vocabulary, however I know it is hard for them to understand since they don’t really have the environment to practice. Just like how Chinese people learn English in China. Although we know the words and grammars, we are not really motivated since we don’t really have chances to use it.

This time, I still put my students into three groups. While different from last time, the tasks for each group are different. I let each group to keep their tasks as secret, so they will not know what other groups are doing until the presentation afterwards. The first group took the task to interview the Chinese students (I took the advantage of our school has international students from China, and I think it is a good opportunity to encourage the American students to use resources), and finish the tasks as follow:

1. Ask the Chinese students if they could memorize and recite the poem. Take down how many people you have interviewed, and how many of them still remember the poem. (Ask them to recite it)
2. Ask the Chinese students about the meaning of the poem (meaning for each line).
3. Ask the Chinese students if they still remember the information about the author, and encourage them to tell you as much as they could. (Make sure that they are not looking it up from the internet)

By communicating with the Chinese students, I hope my students can understand why they are learning Chinese poems to some degree, and I can tell that the little girl who was resistant at first changed her mind a lot after she interviewed the Chinese students.

The task for the second group is focusing on the translation of the poem. However, this time, they were asked to translate from English to Chinese. On their task sheet (Table 1), they will read a version of English translation for the poem first. Under the translation, I provide the Chinese characters, Pinyin and translation for each line of the poem, but in a wrong order. The students are supposed to translate the poem back into Chinese by rearranging the characters according to their understandings of the English translation.

In the Quiet Night

In front of my bed the moonlight is very bright,

I wonder if that can be frost on the floor.

I lift up my head and look at the dazzling moon,

I drop my head, drowned in nostalgia.

---- Translated by Amy Lowell

Altered by the author

night夜yè		quiet静jìng			miss思sī
front 前qián	moon月yuè		bright明míng	Bed床chuáng		light光guāng
up上shàng	doubt疑yí		frost霜shuāng	is是shì		ground地dì
head头tóu	bright明míng		lift举jǔ	moon月yuè		look far望wàng
Ancient 故gù	miss思sī		Head头tóu	drop低dī		village乡xiāng

Table 1

Although some of my students kept saying this made no sense, they actually did a great job in translating the poem back into Chinese. I asked them to compare their translations with the original work by the author afterwards. Even though they all had different versions of translations, it didn’t hurt as long as they understood that exploration and fun were the most important parts of this task.

The last group took the task of searching the information about the author, and finding out what the author wants to tell us through this poem. Sometimes, learning the author is even more important than learning some specific poems. Especially in this case when the author was really famous and had a dramatic life. Most importantly, the author wrote many pieces of amazing poems during his era. After all of the three groups finished their tasks, I asked each group to do a 5 minute presentation to show their work.

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. During the presentation, you may ask the group who does the translation to present front of the group who interviews the Chinese students, since they could show their works of translation confidently before they know the original version.

Poem Study (1): When Traditional Poem Crashes into Modern Technology

The textbook our school uses for intermediate Mandarin class is Traveling in China 1 by Yuhong Zheng. After introducing the Pinyin, this book starts directly with several groups of characters learning instead of making simple conversations. I think this book is good for my students since the class is an intermediate level, the students more or less have some basic conversational skills, so they are ready at least for writing some simple characters. Another good thing about this book is, along with characters, it also has several Chinese poems that contain the characters, which I think is a great idea to make the characters learning not that boring!

While the only shortage of this book is, it doesn’t plan out a detailed instruction on how to teach the poems. I can’t just let my students read the poems and translate them into Chinese for them word by word, especially for my ACTIVE 7th graders. So in this case, if a lecture doesn’t work, group work and self-exploring might be worthy to try.

So here was what I did. The poem that we studied for that day was “春晓” (Spring Morning) by 孟浩然 (Haoran Meng), and I divided the whole class into three groups, with 2 groups of 3 and 1 group of 4. In general, the task for the three groups were the same, which were trying to figure out the meaning of the poem word by word through google translation. Since usually, the sentences will make no sense if they are translated from Chinese to English word by word, the students have to translate it in a “better” English according to their own understandings. After they finished their general task, each of those groups also had their special task. The first group needed to look up the information about the author, the second group was asked to find out the rhythm and the third group was supposed to come up with a new name for the poem! After all the groups finished their tasks, they presented their works to the whole class.

Here were several concerns when I designed this activity. First of all, group work! My intermediate Mandarin class is composed of students with different personalities and learning habits. Most of them are so active and everyone wants to stand out and does not really know how to cooperate with each other. I grouped them myself, and put those who were active and those who were not together to balance the groups. It turned out that most of the groups worked together pretty well and the students dedicated themselves into the tasks for most of the time. Another thought was I asked students to use the google translation to study the poem by themselves. One of the concerns was that some the old teaching methods such as read the poem and then translate might not work efficiently nowadays especially for my 7th grade students and in the world where is full of technologies. There are tons of thousands of information that people can get through internet everyday, and students are also very curious about what they can get from the virtual world. However, you may criticize that google translate may lead students into a wrong place, since what has been translated by google usually makes no sense to native speakers. That’s the point! Students should guess the meaning of the poem through the fragments of the translation that they get from google, which definitely makes the process of learning poems more interesting. Most importantly, students need to compare their translations with the translation from the textbook. From this activity, you not only can let students know that google translate is not always reliable, but also have your students to experience how are Chinese and English sentences different from each other.

Here are the works that have been done by my students:

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士:

1. When using google translate, you may ask students to translate word by word instead of copy and paste the whole sentences at the same time, since they may get no answer for the whole sentence and may skip the meanings of some important words.

Can iPhone Help with Tones Learning?

It is true that when people learn Chinese, the very first, and also the most difficult challenge that they will face is learning the four Chinese tones, which we call them the first tone (ˉ), the second tone (ˊ), the third tone (ˇ) and the fourth tone (ˋ). According to the rules of pronouncing those tones, the first tone is a high and flat tone, the second tone is a rising tone, the third tone drops a little bit and then goes up in the end, the fourth tone is a falling tone.

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Some Chinese teachers and websites which are teaching Chinese tried hard and came up with different ideas on how to make learning tones easier, while honestly, some of those worked well, but some didn't. I used the idea to let my student connect tones with certain English words that MIGHT have the similar pitch and tones. For example, the first tone is once compared with the tone of the first part ("may") of the English word "maybe". I guess since there are variations of pronunciations in English under different situations, and also because sometimes we impose our own ideas (Chinese people's ideas) on how to pronounce a single English word, it didn't work really well when I taught my students by using this way. However, if you tell them to try to be angry and think about the word "No!" in English, it helps a lot when they are learning the fourth tone.

If by any chance I came up with this idea, that could be I checked my phone randomly as usual, and went through app to app to kill my boredom. When I stopped by an app called "Voice Memos", which is an originally installed app by iPhone, I listened to the recordings of my own singing and looked at the ever-changing voice range bar and felt it was interesting since I could actually SEE my voice. I suddenly realized that if my students could also see their voice while they are practicing the tones, would that be helpful and how that can help?

The image of the voice bar is particularly controlled by the volume of someone's voice. So the louder someone speaks, the larger range of image will shows up on the voice bar. Ideally, the trend of the images for the four tones would be the same from time to time if someone pronounces certain tones correctly, as long as they use a normal voice consistently. I started testing myself by recording me pronouncing four different tones for several times, and checking if there were similarities or differences between the images from the voice bar time to time. The result that I have gotten from my experiment was, there were actually differences between the images from different recordings, since the volume of my voice had minor changes naturally every time I spoke. Of course, the louder my voice was, the larger range of image was reflected on the voice bar. However, besides the volume, I do see there is a stable trend of the images showed up on the voice bar.

Here is the voice bar image that I got for the four tones (I used the first vowel in Pinyin "a" as the sound to convey the tones)

                                           Image1

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After several times of recording with normal volume of voices, I actually got the image as shown on the picture above (image1) as an average trend of voice range for the four tones in Chinese respectively. As you can see, if you speak Natalie, the third tone actually has the lowest sound among the others. The second tone is a little bit louder than the third tone, while still lower than the first and the fourth tones. First and fourth tones seemed always competing with each other, sometimes the first tone might beat the fourth tone, while other times the versa. However, the image of the two tones are kind of stable, where the image of the first tone looks like a man with a beer belly, while the fourth tone looks like a lady wearing a big wedding dress.

Amazingly, there were truly some connections between Chinese tones and the iPhone app. I actually felt pretty indulging when I recorded my voice and saw how it has been converted into images. Sometimes it is boring for middle schooler to practice tones, especially when there is no guidance and they don't know where to go. This app might be a good helper at least make them feel it is interesting to practice. Of course, wether it does can help push forward the tones learning or not needed further exploration, and systematic researches on how to use this method efficiently are also needed.

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. You may inform your students in advance that they need to bring their smartphones to the classroom for this activity.

2. You may assign a set of sound for students to record, and tell them that they will play their recording and show their voices bars to the class after everyone finishes. Or you can ask students to record one by one, so the rest of the class can be quite for the student whoever is recording. You may NOT ask students to spread out and record themselves or in groups, what they will turn in would be a piece of "TALK SHOW"!