夏威夷慈濟人文學校 Hawaii Tzu Chi Academy e-Learning site

Preface

Overseas Chinese education is important work for putting down roots for and preserving cultural heritage. In response to changing trends in global Chinese-language education and Chinese learning environments, Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) brought together many scholars and experts with experience teaching Chinese overseas, as well as other deeply experienced Chinese-language teachers from around the world. Their outline for these teaching materials was formulated based on the “Chinese as a Second Language” concept, with reference to the topics in every stage of the U.S. state of California’s World Language Content Standards as well as the language teaching standards set by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Chinese cultural content and special local characteristics were added when appropriate. Not only can these teaching resources increase ethnic Chinese students’ interest in learning the Chinese language; they are also suitable for students of other ethnic backgrounds.

Let’s Learn Chinese is a textbook series with 12 volumes, and 12 lessons for each volume. The content gradually increases in difficulty. Each volume is appropriate for use over the course of one academic term at an overseas Chinese-language school. The lessons revolve around daily conversation, and the content fits the principles of communication, cultures, connection, comparisons, and communities. They are suitable for the elementary and junior high school levels. Their goal is to cultivate students’ ability to use Chinese to communicate in everyday life, so they can immediately use what they’ve learned either at home or in a Chinese-language environment. The after-class practice focuses on task-based teaching. Many kinds of communication models are integrated where appropriate, including bilateral communication, performance and interpretation, and unilateral comprehension, in order to improve students’ listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cross-cultural Chinese- language abilities.

The lesson content includes conservational texts, new words, and sentence structure training as well as other kinds of application exercises. Songs and games are used where appropriate; and audio files are available for download online. Throughout the teaching materials, the Chinese characters, vocabulary, sentence patters, and grammatical structures are quanti ed and ordered. Both phonetic symbols (Bopomofo) and Hanyu Pinyin are used, and the vocabulary and grammar in each volume advance “from low to high proficiency level with the concept of spiral curriculum,” and are very common and usable. The grade levels have shared themes tying together the series. They expand from the narrow to the broad and are appropriate for schools to use for topic-based education, in anticipation of advancing learners’ familiarity with this range of common topics.

Going forward, OCAC will uphold the principle of seeking ever greater improvement by continuing to research and develop excellent Chinese-teaching materials in order to raise ethnic Chinese children’s interest in studying the Chinese language. By helping overseas Chinese schools strengthen their teaching capabilities, OCAC will burnish the excellent brand of Taiwan’s teaching of the Chinese language via traditional characters, accomplishing its mission of preserving the cultural heritage through language education.

Overseas Community Affairs Council