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).