LIBERATE THE JOY OF LISTENING TO CHINESE
In collaboration with College of Arts, Shenzhen University, China, the series promotes and stimulates interest in listening and enhances listening capabilities.
The listening series is based on the teaching material of Liberate the Joy of Learning Chinese series and is its corresponding listening material.
Each unit consists of five lessons. With teaching characters, vocabulary, sentences and paragraphs in sequence and step by step, the units develop students’ listening sense to the phonetics of Putonghua and their comprehension ability in order to deliver proper oral responses to different situations and contexts. A variety of daily life situations are created in the lessons which are conducted in diversified and interesting ways.
The listening process in each lesson is divided into four stages:
- Pre-Listening
- Main Content of the Listening Text (Several dialogues on the same topic)
- Discussion (Exchange information and complete tasks)
- Extensive Listening (More dialogues on the same topic)
Pre-Listening
The exercises at the pre-listening stage use characters, words and sentences on the same topic. Students are required to do multiple choice or matching, classroom activities (e.g. listening to Chinese songs, playing games, etc) and pinyin exercises for further strengthening their Chinese knowledge.
Main Content of the Listening Text
Students are divided into three groups and each is responsible for listening to one conversation on the same topic. After listening, students are required to answer three sets of questions: multiple choices, true or false, answering or intimating the way of speaking. Students should make notes to assist recall of the main idea while listening, and teachers need to adjust the repetition of listening according to students’ Chinese capability.
Discussion
Students have to work together to fill out a form at the discussion stage. Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing skills are built up in exchange, discussing, presenting, analyzing, evaluating and drawing conclusion of messages. In addition to filling in forms, students need to answer open-ended questions, fill in questionnaires, debate and consolidate information.
Extensive Listening
The last stage is extensive listening. Students listen for pleasure and need not do exercises in this part. By means of exposure to more spoken texts, students’ interest in listening should be enhanced in turn.