Grade 8: Communicating

PRESCRIBED LEARNING OUTCOMES

• request and provide information about day-to-day activities and interests
• describe day-to-day activities and interests in oral and written forms
• participate in short conversations

To view the prescribed learning outcomes for Communicating in other grades click on an icon below.

SUGGESTED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

• Have students request and give simple directions for getting to various places. (e.g., Wvang qian zvou.)
• Ask students in pairs to role-play making plans for the weekend with friends. Suggest that they discuss what they like to do, places to visit, and so on.
• Provide students with a skeleton letter to adapt by adding their own information. For an authentic communication exercise, students could send their letters to an exchange class in another community.
• Ask students to prepare and rehearse questions they can use to interview classmates. Invite them to group questions by theme (e.g., family, school, likes or dislikes). After the interviews, have students present their findings to the class and discuss. As a follow-up activity, pairs of students could practise role-playing interview situations, then present their role plays to the class.

SUGGESTED ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES

• When students role-play various situations, provide criteria that they can use for self- and peer assessment. Criteria might include:
  • conveys an understandable message in Chinese
  • includes relevant and interesting details or features
  • sustains interaction, finding ways to deal with breaks in the dialogue in order to keep the conversation going (e.g., uses body language, attempts to self-correct, repeats phrases slowly to help partner understand)
  • uses a variety of vocabulary and language structures (e.g., questions, responses)
  These criteria can be the basis for a checklist or rating scale to be used throughout the course by the teacher and students.
• Use similar criteria in assessing letters and other written work. For example:
  • meaning is clear
  • includes interesting and relevant details
  • follows appropriate conventions practised in class (e.g., greetings, closings, use of titles)
  • uses a range of vocabulary to complete simple sentences
  • takes risks to use language not practised in class
• Provide students with sentence frames to use in writing about their strategies for learning Chinese. For example:
  • I learn Chinese best when I ____________ .
  • The hardest thing I've learned in Chinese is ____________ .
  • I'd like to learn how to ____________ .
  • Someone who helps me practise Chinese is ____________ .

• Chinese Sentence Book
• Concise English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary (Oxford)
• Let's Play Games In Chinese

• The Dragon's Tongue Series
• Speak Mandarin in Five Hundred Words
• Tadpole and the Whale

• Chinese Mandarin Resource Book - Volumes 1, 2, and 3
• Zhongguotong

• The Rosetta Stone Language Library - Chinese Mandarin I

  BC Ministry of Education Home Page