Fourth Week of Chinese LL Challenge - JUST DO IT

汉语词汇学习第四周

Hey everyone! Welcome to the [Fourth Week] of my Chinese Language Learning Challenge!

No, this blog isn't sponsored by 'NIKE'. It's just what kept coming up in my thoughts throughout this week's challenge.

"JUST DO IT"

You would have noticed since last week, as much as I don't enjoy using Quizlet's learning games anymore, the results have shown that it works.

Technologies

Quizlet

Something that I've just noticed this week, I thought that I wouldn't have time to play the activities on Quizlet due to being busy so I thought I'd try it out on my phone. The problem was, 

[the games weren't available on the phone!]



I thought this was a huge deal since most website functions are also capable on the phone versions. It was a little  bit inconvenient since I didn't want to take time from other assessments just to do the game - I wanted to keep every week's study as consistent as possible so I had to play the games...

Anyway, I made time to play the games to further concrete my knowledge of this week's vocabulary. 

PRE-TEST Results Unit 9

 
By the way, I hadn't mentioned yet that I took a lot of time to make this new template for the pre/post tests. I think this way is the easiest way as I can easily cover the pre-test side with another sheet of paper when doing the post-test; it also feels like I'm taking a real test.

Now for the results, I made two errors scoring 33/35. 

My thoughts on this week's unit, the pre-test wasn't that hard; a lot of students in the class complained that the difficulty was getting harder and that we should focus more on the characters with more strokes. Consequently, I made two errors on the 'easier' Chinese characters and made no mistakes on words like  '输赢' and '教授' (I was pretty impressed I still remembered how to write these).



Unit 9 Study and Integration of Technology

Honestly, the easy Chinese characters were easily re-learnt through Quizlet since it shouldn't be that difficult to learn them. However, there were quite a few 'medium-difficulty' words in this unit that I had a little trouble retaining knowledge throughout the week so I decided to focus on those a bit more with Pleco (as shown on the left).

The feeling is the same, I know that now that I have spent time on these words and took the time to understand individually + how they tie along with similar words to easily distinguish from homonyms, I won't be struggling too much in the post-test. 

(Feeling smarter already)

POST-TEST Results Unit 9
Just a note before I show the result, the games I played to concrete my knowledge (Match, Meteor), felt more like a drill and I completely disregarded it as a 'game' that I play, and just did it. 



















100%.



















Although at the start of this whole Chinese LL Challenge I thought that my learning goal was a bit too ambitious and unachievable, but I think that using Quizlet and Pleco alone could take me to achieve it.

If you look back at my Learning Goal in my Proposal, I wrote that I would learn 200 words by the end of Week 6. So far (including this week), I have already learnt 139 words that I can retain!  Although that's half the challenge - other half being able to retain it till Week 6 - I've been acing these quizzes with ease and will most probably exceed the 200 word limit that I've set for myself!

These thoughts alone actually motivate me very much - didn't know that motivation could come from these places, but it has. My morale is rising higher after this week, I'm now past half-way through this challenge, I should be able to do the rest successfully. 

["JUST DO IT' the way you've been doing and you will achieve your goals"] 

...is what I say to myself regularly, and I don't think it's a bad thing to think at all.

In the areas of vocabulary learning, motivation (as I've also said before), is a huge part and I'm glad at this point in the challenge, I am finding new ways to motivate myself; whether it may be telling myself to just do it, or thinking ahead in time and feeling the satisfaction of achieving my learning goal. (Chapelle, 2009).



References

Chapelle, C. (2017), The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning, From Past to Present: A Hundred Years of Technology for L2 Learning. pp(10-25).

Third Week of Chinese LL Challenge - Stability and Consistency in my Language Learning

汉语词汇学习第三周

Hey everyone! Welcome to the [Third Week] of my Chinese Language Learning Challenge!

As you are aware by now, this weeks focus is on stability. I've now completed two weeks of this challenge and I documented in the last blog in regards to the activities I am doing and whether or not I'll get tired of them.

"Does it really matter if I get sick of it 

if I'm getting good results?" 

I'll have to see the results of this weeks post-test in comparison to the pre-test to answer that question, but this will be the focus of this week's blog. 

Quizlet & Pleco

So I've mostly highlighted already in the previous weeks what I do with Quizlet, I'm running out of new things to try within this application, however, I don't see why I shouldn't do the same things repeatedly if I might get the same perfect scores and results. So that's why I won't be repeating what I said the last blog, I'm just going to do the same activities, same learning strategies and see how that affects my scores at the post-test.

Same goes towards Pleco, this application is rather simple, if I need more information on a particular word, I can obtain it in order to learn that word more efficiently and better. It hasn't failed me yet either, it doesn't really have any fun activities that separates it from any other dictionary, but it's the convenience; from learning one character, I'm exposed to many more characters with the same conjunctions etc. 

PRE-TEST Results Unit 8


As you can see from the pre-test on the left, I made five mistakes - the most I've gotten wrong in a pre-test so far. This week's unit was pretty hard due to the amount of words that I
haven't seen being pretty high.

I've spent a lot of time on each week's units so I can't blame the amount of time I spent to be the reason for these errors; I'm very sure that I spent the same amount of time, therefore, I believe it's just the difficulty of the units getting harder as it gets towards the end of the textbook.

These two combinations - difficulty getting harder, and the high quantity of words I've never seen before - are the reason I believe I didn't do that well in this week's unit.

I think it's a good chance to see if the methods and learning styles I've been using will be consistent; if I'm able to ace the post-test, it will prove that the methods I've been using are useful and effective for my learning goal - memorising and retaining the set amount of words.

Which will most likely answer the question for this week,

"Does it really matter if I get sick of it if I'm getting good results?". 

I'll have to see at the end of this week after the post-test then.

[Throughout the Week]

The study methods remain constant to the last two weeks to test out the efficacy of my methods along with the technologies being used. 

There is a sharp distinction between the hard and easy characters shown by the number of strokes in the Chinese words. I chose to only write down the 'harder' words so I'm not wasting time on the easier ones. 

[a few days later...]

POST-TEST Results Unit 8
Throughout the week whilst studying these characters with Quizlet and Pleco, I could feel the confidence in acing the test uprising correspondingly to the amount of time I spent on the task. It's to no surprise actually, in Chapelle's (2017) research clarifies that the time on the task is one of the main factors of effective language acquisition. 

  

Whilst doing the post-test, I could feel the confidence I had built throughout studying with Quizlet  and Pleco, and as expected, I scored 100%!!!

Thoughts:

I'm not going to lie, the games I played on Quizlet were getting so tiresome. I knew in the back of my head that if I 'just did it' (✓),  I wouldn't regret it when it's time to see the results. Perhaps I should look for another platform/application similar to Quizlet, but the conclusion will most likely be the same - me getting sick of playing the same games over and over again for the final goal: to memorise and retain the knowledge. So, do I just

[keep doing the same thing?].

Maybe. 

I'm not going to lie (again), it's not going to be fun for you guys who are viewing my blog since I'm constantly using the same methods, but maybe you (the viewers) will enjoy the journey of me scoring 100% on my post-tests and then seeing the REAL result at the end of Week 6 of the LL Challenge - where I do the big test, covering all the units I covered in this blog to see if I've retained the knowledge attained through studying with Quizlet and Pleco.

Anyway, it's my journey that I'm sharing. Maybe you'd have invested enough time to care about my final results or not, but I have, so I need to see the end of it.

Till Next Time!

再见!

References

Chapelle, C. (2017), The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning, From Past to Present: A Hundred Years of Technology for L2 Learning. pp(10-25).

Second Week of Chinese LL Challenge - Getting used to it

WELCOME BACK 
It's the second week of the LL Challenge and I'm pretty excited to see how things go from here. Since I have tweaked my proposal, I'm keen to see how I'll manage with the less full-on working hours of input.

***A little refresher*** I'm going to be talking about Unit 7 this week, as I'm writing this at the start of the week, I'll be showing my pre-test of Unit 7 to show how much I know after the quiz, and at the end of the week, I'll upload the second part of that quiz to see the results of using  Pleco and Quizlet.

Unit 7 Study & Integration of Technologies
  
Originally, I would be talking about Unit 6 as well as Unit 7, however, Unit 6 was too simple and it would be a waste of time to even talk about it - I didn't have to use either of the chosen technologies because it was that easy.

SO, as per usual, I started off with my memorising-by-rote technique and writing it many times to get familiar with writing the characters down. This is particularly helpful for doing the quiz since if I do this right before the quiz in class, it's really fresh in my mind and muscle memory - I can start writing it down on paper before thinking about what it looks like. Keep in mind, this isn't the only thing I do. At the same time, since I don't know what the word sounds like, I need to listen to the pronunciation so that I can memorise it in two different techniques; memorising through writing repetitively and also repeatedly listening to the word as I look at the meaning.

Quizlet 

This is where Quizlet jumps in and aids this type of learning. There is a function on Quizlet where it allows you to play the audio of the Chinese word and its English translation repeatedly. For harder words, not the words that I can learn without this method, I can use this function to help focus on which word I am writing down, without letting my mind drift away when writing the word repeatedly - this was one of the difficulties I had to face when memorising by rote as my mind would be somewhere else whilst my hand is writing down the word.




As always, in order to do what I mentioned above, I needed a Study Set to do the listening task. Luckily, another user of Quizlet (Jeremy_Weir) had made yet another set that I could benefit from!



Pleco

As I said in the previous week, I use Pleco specifically for the words that I find 'difficult' to memorise. You can see in the picture above of the words that were 'difficult' to memorise marked with a small star ✩. My poor editing skills actually blocked two of the stars that I marked next to "Persist, uphold" and "Happiness, happy", but keep in mind that those were hard to learn and therefore marked.

The words I specifically had trouble learning were these three:
- 坚持 (Persist, Uphold)
- 幸福 (Happiness, Happy)
- 伟大 (Great, Mighty)
As you have probably noticed, I didn't include Great, Mighty (伟大), as it was only the radical that I couldn't familiarise myself with - it was hard to remember at first but I eventually got it since it wasn't that many strokes.
Moving on, this week I broke up the words into individual characters to get a better understanding of it. Pleco allowed me to not only get the definition, but also other words that I could use it for that were also commonly used. I could easily find three words that the specific Chinese character would fit in, which were also used commonly - the other characters used in those compounds were characters that I've learnt previously, so it was interesting to see that those two different characters together could create another meaning.

Focusing on specific words and characters like I did this week made me realise that the learning and understanding of these words/characters were coming naturally as I investigated its alternative uses. This helped majorly and I recommend myself to keep using this method of learning harder characters in future studies.                   






Evaluation



Firstly, I'd like to say that making a template for the Pre and Post-Tests was more difficult than I thought, I'd love to find a website with pre-made templates for these kinds of sheets - I wasted a lot of time trying to make even grids and in the end I hand-drew over the lines to make different sections...

Pre-Test Unit 7

Now for the results of the Pre-Test. I made 3 minor errors, the first highlighted error, I highlighted it not because I got it totally wrong, but because I knew how it looked but I failed to write it down correctly with confidence; leaving an abnormal stroke. For 'Frighten, Feared", I wrote it almost correctly except that I put the left side on the ride side and vice versa. However, overall a good mark getting only 3 incorrect.

For the next couple of days before I do the Post-Test, I'll be implementing my technologies even further for the aim to reach 100% memorability. This means, through Quizlet, I'll not only be using the 'Write' and 'Test' functions, I'll also be testing out the games offered such as 'Match' and 'Gravity'.

Post - Test Unit 7

Just in case the message wasn't clear, I scored 100%!

(100% !!!)

Just in case the message wasn't clear, I scored 100%!

I'm especially happy this week as I made a promise to myself that I would try my hardest to follow my plans and activities set for this week on my LL Challenge, and I was able to keep it!. The biggest challenge was obviously retaining the memory of the characters and their strokes, but also, retaining the accumulating vocabulary every week can be a struggle. I can see that in the fifth week of my LL Challenge that, if I don't keep up with my Quizlet activities, I'm going to be struggling to ace the final test in Week 6. 

Final Notes

I think the biggest factors of this week's success comes from the different methods of testing my knowledge. I was able to ''test out' the vocabulary that I learnt in order to make it concrete. 

These small motivational boosters were actually quite meaningful after I tried hard to get the fastest time!

Knowing that the learning strategy I am using is working, it gives me a lot of positive motivation; my progress in this LL Challenge shows that now I have learnt and retained 69 new Chinese words! Motivation is one of the four key aspects of the language learning process (Nunan, 1997), and through knowing that these learning strategies are affecting my levels of motivation positively, I'm able to take responsibility of my own language learning and personal development; correspondingly to Weinstein and Mayer's (1986) study. If I push through with this, my learning goal is going to be met so I'll keep this in mind. 

I want to see whether or not I'll get tired of using this same method, It's only been a week since I've used the games etc. but I feel like it could get old - just like playing any other games constantly.
On that note, we'll see how that goes next week!



References:

Nunan. D, (1997) Lenguas Modernas , Does learner strategy training make a difference?,24, pp. 123-142

Nunan. D, Lillian, L. C., (2011-6), The learning styles and strategies of effective language learners, pp144-163 DOI:10.1016/j.system.2011.05.004

Weinstein. C, Mayer, R. (1996) (M.C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (third ed.), The Teaching of Learning Strategies, Macmillan, New York (1986), pp. 315-327