“This is the day my stepmom and dad got married. This one is the day of my little brother’s birthday…”
9th Grade Mandarin 1 speakers and writers are sharing information about important moments in their lives in written and verbal presentation. (This is my hardest class to catch student quotes because even our year one speakers’ class is over 80% in the target language and I don’t speak any Mandarin!) “Ni zhi dao ma…” Someone was using a good, advanced structure, I’m told. Their teacher pauses to clarify in English that two ways to say “I don’t care” have very different connotations—one rude and the other a more neutral way of saying, “I have no preference.”
Students’ posters each present three important moments in their lives and they are practicing their phrasing by presenting one another’s posters, adding an element of needing to both read and present at once. After they complete this, students play a round of bingo with small cards of Mandarin characters. The teacher reads the character three times and students turn the card over. They pause sometimes in English to discuss things, like tricks they have for remembering a character’s meaning. “It [Suì] looks to me like a sun setting over the mountain, which makes sense with ‘age’ because mountains have to be there a long time just to form.”
It [Suì] looks to me like a sun setting over the mountain, which makes sense with ‘age’ because mountains have to be there a long time just to form.
Students then play collaboratively against their teacher in bingo, with one student running the game. If they win three times before she does, they get to write their name down for “game points” on a chart paper in the classroom, which they do (with glee).