Step 7: Tingxie - give learners a positive experience of doing an (often dreaded) dictation
In this series, I’m sharing seven areas I pre-teach to new learners before starting any course or programme. They are:
Characters 🀄️
Digital Dictionaries 📓
Stroke Order 🖌
Radicals 口
Pinyin 🗣
Tones & Numbers 1️⃣
听写 📝
For teaching purposes, I reframe the steps like this:
✅ Inspire: Have a sparkly eyed “aha” learning moment with characters (read here)
✅ Equip: As soon as possible, equip learners with a digital/web based Mandarin dictionary & set up input of Mandarin in phones & computers (read here)
✅ Write: Begin to learn, practice and appreciate stroke order (read here).
✅ Appreciate: Start to recognise and appreciate basic radicals
✅ Type: Know the basic rules of pinyin
✅ Count: Memorise the numbers 1-10 by heart in correct tones
➡️ Tingxie: Have a positive experience of doing an (often dreaded) dictation
Note:
It may take 2 or even 3 lessons to teach the numbers, get learners to memorise how to write each one, and memorise them in perfect tones.
It depends on many things: speed of learning what’s been taught so far, budget, goals, etc. I differentiate the time and approach spent getting the numbers right based on the learners and size of group.
You can teach the Tingxie instructions to help with the numbers if it will encourage learners to memorise them!
Rationale
Session 7 objectives:
In this lesson, the main learning objectives are:
Understand what a tingxie is
Understand why a tingxie is an important tool for learning Mandarin at any level
Know how to prepare for a tingxie
Know how to prepare for a Sumbella 老师 style 4-part 听写: 1) handwriting characters from memory, 2) correct pinyin spelling, 3) correct tones, and 4) English meanings
Session 6 lesson outline
Spiral progression - review & refresh:
Learners should be greeting with ‘老师好‘ by now!
Review the dialogue and previous characters
Review the numbers
Classroom vocab: Cover the same vocabulary: 好不好, 好 & 好的, 上课, 对不对. This time add 下课, and start getting students used to it. Perhaps explain 上 and 下 in very simple terms.
Share learning objective: I share the learning objectives as mentioned above.
Share the measure of success: e.g. that they end the lesson having trained for and attempted to complete a 听写
Plenary: Big question - what is the purpose of a dictation? When are they used? Why?
Ask learners to run some Google searches or look up the word in the dictionary.
Explain dictations are a tool to help with memory and in the context of learning Mandarin Chinese they are used widely to ensure learners know new vocabulary.
Introduce the idea of this lesson: that we’re going to prepare for and then do a Tingxie together
Training and preparation:
Begin in a similar way to the very first lesson: show the end goal with the characters you’re going to practice. This will be the 6: 你，好，我，叫，呢，再，见。
Explain the four parts:
Ask learners to look at the different columns and try to find out what the characters mean. Explain each column and its purpose:
Note that I ask for pinyin with accent marks AND the tones written in numbers. I do this because I want to make extra sure my learners have actually memorised the tone and are clear about the tone mark being used.
Activity - Fast and Slow
Ask learners to write a character ten times very slowly - making sure stroke order is correct.
Then do the same more quickly -as fast as possible.
Repeat: Ask them to repeat this for the other characters. Play some music, let students practice and train. (Make sure they are also paying attention to pinyin and the tones and English)
Run the tingxie: Read out the characters one by one! Give learners a chance to complete. Monitor for correct stroke order.
Mark the Tingxie together - showing learners what you look for.
You may want to let learners know that this will be the structure for the new lessons and other new characters you introduce them to.
Summary
This part of the session is usually really relaxing and enjoyable! By this point you don’t need to teach anything strictly because they know all the skills. You’re just there to cheer them on and monitor for accuracy!
That brings us to the end of the ab initio skills I teach all my new learners of Mandarin Chinese. :)