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.
- 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%!
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| (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.
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| 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
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