Week 4 SLAT2002 Language Learning Challenge Blog – Draft proposal (3)

Week 4 SLAT2002 Language Learning Challenge Blog – 

Draft proposal (3)

My Challenge

I am now studying Chinese at an intermediate level since I have been studying this language for 3 years, however, I still have not managed to find an effective way to memorise the given vocabulary. I have noticed throughout the course of learning Chinese at UQ that I could not retain the knowledge of the Chinese characters that I have studied. Even if I was to ace the quizzes, I always seem to forget how to write some characters even after a week has passed. For this reason, and for reasons of obtaining a good grade for this course, I am heavily motivated to complete this blog with my utmost determination.

My Learning Goal

The goal for me is to memorise the quizzed vocabulary, which is around 200 new Chinese by the end of the 6 week period. Not only this, I will be challenging myself to be able to retain the knowledge of the memorised words through the strategies outlined further below. By memorising these words effectively, I can achieve my ultimate goal of acing the weekly quizzes every week.

My Learning Styles and Strategies

During the lecture/tutorial time in the SLAT2002 class, there was an activity given to us which evaluates our learning styles. Through that activity, I wasn’t surprised to see that I was a visual learner as I love to take a lot of notes, draw diagrams, making summaries, copying down information from the board etc. I was however a little surprised to see that I had traits of a kinesthetic learner too. This is due to the fact that I believe studying in study groups, doing role-plays, and studying in short bursts with a lot of breaks are all effective ways of studying for me as well.

Through knowing this, the strategies I am determined to use include; not studying alone, taking notes of Chinese characters and an easier way to learn them, using the flashcard function from the chosen technology, and taking short breaks in between long periods of study.

Through writing this, I believe that these learning strategies could help not only with my Language Learning Challenge, but possibly with other content from other courses. 

The Technologies I Am Going to Test

Through studying Japanese as a major, I have found many apps that were specifically great for learning Japanese. As for Chinese, I cannot say that I have found an app yet other than the online dictionary ‘Pleco’. I have mainly used Pleco to assist me in my studies, but I have never used it for helping me with memorising the Chinese characters. I have used Quizlet back when I was studying Japanese, the flash cards had helped me through the memorisation process, and that’s why I decided on using this.

I have been fiddling around with the functions of Quizlet, and I have found some new options that I had not used before. The functions I intended to use were solely the flashcards and the text-to-speech function, however, upon discovering the ‘Learn’, ‘Test’, and ‘Match’ functions, I am keen to give them a go.

(Motivators!)

(Easy Access)

Furthermore, Pleco (Online Chinese Dictionary App) has an awesome function where it shows you the stroke order of characters, uses of those characters in a sentence, and other collocations with that specific character. Thinking about using these functions excites me as I know for a fact that these could help immensely in my progress with Chinese language learning.

(Word Collocations)

(Example Sentences for this word)

(Physically writing the characters)

 

(Stroke Order)

My Plan

At the moment, my plan is to break up the 200 Chinese characters that I will be learning into 6 weeks, therefore leaving me with around 30-35 Chinese characters a week.

Note: The Chinese characters I am quizzed on weekly from CHIN3020 are not always the same amount, that is why I cannot have the same set amount of characters I must learn every week. Also, the 30-35 Chinese characters will coincide with that week’s quiz from CHIN3020.

I will then use Quizlet for not only its flashcard functions but the function for text to speech, and memorise to the best of my ability the 30-35 Chinese characters for the given week. The efficacy of this app will be assessed through my evaluation approach.

My Evaluation Approach

The evaluation process consists of two steps. Firstly, I will receive my marks from the quizzes in my Chinese course. Based on the marks I receive from my tutor, I will know which words/Chinese characters I have written down incorrectly. The second way I will evaluate my approach will be based on my own tests.

My pre-test of the vocabulary will be in the form of my actual quiz answers + the characters that weren’t in the quiz. These pre-tests will be revisited in the following week when I receive the quiz results with a follow up in a post-test.

Note: In Week 1, the pre-test will be from the quiz taken from the previous week’s quiz – due to a public holiday being on a Wednesday, there will be two weeks’ worth of quizzes in Week 1 of the LLC – where only half of these will be in my pre-test for Week 1.

To be more precise:

Week 0: Pre-test of previous quiz in week 4 of uni classes;

Week 1: Pre-test of Week 5 quiz + Post-test of Week 4 quiz;

Week 2: Pre-test of Week 6 Quiz + Post-test of Week 5 quiz;

Week 3: Pre-test of Week 7 quiz + Post-test of Week 6 quiz;

Week 4: Pre-test of Week 8 quiz + Post-test of Week 7 quiz;

Week 5: Pre-test of Week 9 quiz + Post-test of Week 8 quiz;

Week 6: Pre-test of Week 10 quiz + Post-test of Week’s 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 quizzes.

 (Photos of these will be posted each week)

I will know that I have achieved my goal when I am able to see perfect results in each of these weeks.