Incorporating Online Materials and Digital Learning/Assessing Tools into Advanced Chinese Newspaper Reading and News Watching

This is the report of a year-long blended learning project designed for advanced Chinese newspaper reading and news video watching. In advanced Chinese learning, newspaper reading and news video watching are considered quite challenging for Chinese language learners for their formal style, large and time-sensitive vocabulary, and limited exposure through traditional ways of learning/teaching. To meet these challenges, we incorporated three blended learning components into the traditional language teaching/learning, including: online video news subtitling, the digital exercises and assessment system, and computerized vocabulary-learning modules tailored to the course materials used for two advanced Chinese classes. The project is carried out in two advanced Chinese courses taught at Mount Holyoke College: AS312: Learning Chinese through Newspapers and AS311: Third Year Chinese (also using news reports as instructional materials). The goals of this project are: 1) to meet the aforementioned linguistic and pedagogical challenges by incorporating the three aforementioned digital components; 2) to improve student engagement by empowering them with some digital self-learning and self-assessing tools; and 3) to support linguistic skill development by providing the students with a more extensive context and wider exposure through the proposed blended learning strategies. In our conference presentation, we will discuss the pedagogical thinking of the project design, the learning goals and strategies of the three digital components, and the specific teaching steps, technological solutions, and integration of the computerized or online learning into the traditional classroom teaching. Finally, we also want to provide a preliminary report on the results of our pedagogical research, examining the effectiveness of the blended learning strategies adopted in this project and finding ways to further enhance the usability of the experimented teaching/learning strategies