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

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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.