Oct 10 2007
Learning from Chinesepod (and not only chinese!)
If you haven’t checked out Chinesepod.com, do so. A friend pointed it out to me. I have recently been exploring it in the last couple of weeks and have been impressed for several reasons. For one, it’s got a lot of appeal. The overall look is hip and fun and the moderators conduct lessons with pleasant voices full of warmth and humor. Hey, no distance here in this distance learning site! Chinesepod is an inviting place that makes one feel encouraged to give learning Chinese a try.
Another big plus for me is the organization of the content. I know, I know…..it’s old-hat knowledge by now that subject material can be organized by tags (“meta-tags” is the correct term as I have been told) which make everything easily accessible for the user. But for some of us older non digital natives (am I that old?) these things aren’t so obvious. I had an “aha” moment when I realized that this was what we needed for our distance learning program. Course material is tagged by level, theme, and function and is very easy to navigate through. A friend of mine pointed out to me that such a tagging system allows the student more control to self direct learning. Yep. Exactly. Of course. I knew that. It’s all so obvious now.
Another big moment for me with Chinesepod (less of an “aha,” more of an “u huh”) was when I noticed a feature on their site called “the Fix.” The Fix is a short audiocast that helps students practice and retain vocabulary. The approach it uses is much like the Pimsleur method which has the student anticipate the translation for something stated in English before the speaker gives the answer. This causes the learner to quickly access memory and retrieve the word that has just been learned and to say it before the speaker gives it away. You have to think quickly to keep up! After a time through with the new vocabulary, the process is then repeated at a faster pace which further solidifies the learned words in long-term memory.
Having tried out the Pimsleur method last year while trying to learn Russian— ??, ? ?????? ??????? ??-??????!— I was familiar with this approach and have been thinking about it for a while. Actually methods using translation have been a faux pas in the high school classroom for years (the exception here is TPRS ) because of the fundamentalist zeal of immersionist teachers. (Don’t get me wrong….I love immersion, but most high school classrooms do not offer immersive environments.)
My idea was to have some sort of rapid fire translation practice at the end of each lesson. Now that I see that they are using such a technique on Chinesepod, I am encouraged. The question is, will high school age learners buy into it and actually make use of such practice.
The answer? Yes!…that is, if it works. We have to let them self direct learning, remember? They’ll figure it out what works for them.