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.