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The Little Reader

June 12, 2018

The Little Reader

This semester, our Non-Native Level Chinese teachers tried to change the way they used the Read Aloud period to better engage their students. The teachers divided their new activity into two parts.

One part involved asking the class to read whole texts in unison. Each class selected one of the favorite stories from their Chinese textbooks, then read them together.

The other part involved selecting 1 or 2 student representatives from each class to participate, read the contents they loved, and select appropriate music to accompany their recital.

Several points regarding the new activity were particularly impressive.

First of all, the students in the sixth grade intermediate class were neat, loud, and clear. Their range of tones and the emotions brought us into the story and even surpassed the two advanced classes whose Chinese level was higher than them, allowing them to win the championship!

In Class 5(4) there was Lu Kaisi, who worked very hard and won the fifth grade individual competition championship. His Chinese pronunciation has a southern accent, and his spoken tongue is not always good. But on the day of the competition, his accent was completely gone, and during reading, the voices of the two animal heroes in his story were completely different, and his tone was also in place. If we hadn’t seen only one person on the stage, we would surely have thought that two students were reading it. With such an outstanding performance, Kaisu truly deserved to win the championship.

Many of the students’ performances in this individual competition surprised the teachers. The students chose their stories themselves. Their selections included fables, historical stories, prose, modern poetry, and also some poems from the ancient ‘Shijing’ anthology, known in English as The Book of Songs. Amazing!

After this activity, the teachers now hope that their students can continue to read aloud in their future Chinese studies, not only to understand the thoughts and emotions expressed by the author in the texts better, but also to bring themselves and their listeners deeper into the literary world.

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(Written by Ms.Liu Chen Editor: Ms.Liu Dong Photos by Ms.Liu Chen)