Popular culture and engagement in teaching Mandarin : an action research project

This study focuses on how to use popular culture as teaching material to engage students in learning Mandarin in Australian schools. The aim of this research was to explore whether popular culture can engage students in learning with high intellectual quality, and provide a more contemporary picture of Chinese society by presenting popular culture to students. This study used action research as the main methodology to investigate the influence of popular culture on engagement. The action research comprised three cycles and employed three aspects of popular culture respectively: popular songs, movies and teen magazine. Each cycle lasted for four to seven lessons and formed a sequence from single-dimensional to multidimensional focuses. For the evaluation of student engagement, data were collected from the researcher’s self-reflections and field notes, including classroom observations, student self-assessment and other feedback, and interviews. The REAL Framework (Munns and Woodward, 2006) was used to design questions for student self-assessment, which provided student feedback to the teacher on student classroom engagement. The study shows that popular culture has the advantage of stimulating student engagement in an affective, operative and cognitive way. Young students enjoy the learning content and this increases their interest and motivation. Some forms of popular culture can facilitate specific language ability: for example, music is useful for developing students’ pronunciation and speaking. Cognitive engagement improves in a varied way, from simple recall to a deeper and more complex understanding of their learning and knowledge. Nevertheless, students will not be automatically engaged by this material without the application of good teaching strategies. The results demonstrate that student engagement largely depends on how well the teacher incorporate popular culture context in teaching and how well the teacher incorporates the popular culture context into the teaching and how well the teacher uses pedagogical knowledge to teach and manage the students. The researcher, as a early beginning teacher, developed her understanding of how to engage students and came to realise what a teacher can do to develop student engagement effectively. This study may contribute to our knowledge of how to use popular culture to effectively teach and learn second languages in general, and Chinese as a second language in particular. It also provides suggestions for the application of the MeE Framework (Munns and Martin, 2005) and the REAL Framework (Munns and Woodward, 2006) in different contexts of practice