Progress Report and Reflection_REN Zhaohui

Since the goal of my improvement project is to help my students be more motivated and engaged

in learning Chinese and I have conducted the survey via questionnaire according to my plan,

which lasted three weeks from Feb. 3rd to Feb. 21st including sending out the questionnaire,

collect them back, analyzing and working out the method accordingly. In students’

questionnaire (See Appendix), there’s an open-ended question: Which one is your most

impressive Chinese class and what did you learn from that class? Over 90% of students gave the

answer with either the class had Golden-coin game or Spin-the-wheel game, which were the

most popular games chosen by students. This probably partly reflected on my project: Language

involved interactive activities indeed could be more engaging to students, thus motivate them to

learn more.

According to what I found out through the survey, I designed more interesting interactive or

competitive games (See Appendix) for each lesson. Over the past two weeks since I integrated

more games, I noticed in 5th Grade, students were more engaged in learning compared with two

weeks before. The Telephone game on the vocabulary practice part allowed more students to

participate. The cooperative and encouraging style inside each team made the team members feel

more comfortable to speak out, while the competition between each team triggered students’

passion to practice.

There was also unexpected things happened. In one of the 3rd Grade class, students were so into

the Body twist game but did not put much effort in the second activity - Find Out the Monster,
which needs them to figure out the number, color, body parts that describe the Monster. I think

the Body twist game allows them to move and have more fun, yet the Finding out the monster

requires them recognizing the numbers, colors, body parts and characters, thus needs more effort,

which immediately demotivates them. I think I need to design the game in a way that is more

difficulty-level-appropriate in order to maintain students’ interest to learn.

The other unexpected finding was that students are very interested in learning language through

songs, especially when they get the chance to perform in public. We had an international fair at

the end of February in one of my schools and I had two groups of my students from 3rd and 4th

Grades to sing Chinese songs on the stage as the contribution from our Chinese program to the

international fair. I surprisingly found out that not only those who were chosen to perform on the

stage work harder to practice those songs, but also their classmates, which was really a great

surprise for me. I think I will continue to teach students Chinese songs to inspire them to learn.

Appendix:

1. Questionnaire
2. Activities

a. Match
b. Golden coin

c. Twister