(CHNS 101Y) Teaching Chinese online requires detailed planning and meticulous content building to guide students en route to self-paced, independent learning. While students have greater freedom in the learning schedule, I see to it that exercises and tests are fully spread out across the week. Besides using SpeakingEverywhere, an online learning platform developed by Purdue’s Japanese and Chinese teaching teams, to help students with speaking, and WebEx video meetings for exercises, feedback, and tests, I ask my students to create digital projects on cultural topics to enrich each other, and introduce a modified language partner program with the students acting as each other’s learning partners. The interactions turn our online class into a community where everybody talks and some become friends. It is wonderful to keep a good rapport with my distant students, when they thank me for prompt feedback and say it is rewarding seeing the progress they have made over a short time.
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