Producing Podcasts in a Chinese Classroom: A Digital Humanities Project

This paper describes an experiment that engages students taking the second part of an Introductory Chinese course with an assignment to create podcasts in the form of an interview. Requiring students to integrate the aural, oral, and textural information via technology so as to carry a conversation with an interlocutor challenges them to convey their thoughts from the language they think in into meaningful ideas using the target language. In this way, students are pushed to convert their listening, speaking, and writing from being isolated components into a more dynamic and cohesive mode of communicating. As they explore expressing their ideas in the language they are learning, they develop the skills and sensibility needed to critically analyze their own work. Although limited in scale, the podcast format urges students to transform what they need to learn into a familiar product