The Students

In general, students at this level would have been studying or living in China in their past. Or they might have taken up a Chinese studies degree in Uni.

In everyday life, these students won’t have problem expressing themselves in Chinese, they also know a good amount of Hanzi, and read and write. Most of them come to our class to keep their language skill alive, and to continue strengthen their language level closer to native speaking fluency and literacy.

In terms of speaking, they are good, but they might still have accents, they might not be as fast as native speakers. They could get too comfortable using common words than abstract words.

In terms of reading, they can read, but not newspaper, and would be substantially slower than native speakers.

In terms of listening, they can’t understand the whole of TV news yet, but they are getting there, they are very interested in listening to interesting Chinese videos and exploring what’s new in China. That’s why social media resources are great to engage them at this level.

Writing could be homework, if your students are keen.

In terms of learning content, besides the HSK textbook content to take up half of their learning time, we should engage them with more real life audio visual material. They are interested in discussing current affairs related to Chinese society and culture. The teacher can bring in such elements by, for example, simply sharing with them the current popular internet slang 网络流行词. At the same time, games and activities that allow them to express their ideas and have FUN.

Please request access to Zoho folder below:

The Materials

Term Start & Term End

Term Start: Since students are rather vocal and would be eager to speak Chinese by this level, each term start for ice breaking, perhaps use small talk conversation cards, or other creative ways you can design to bring some energy and excitement to the class.

Term End: There is no assessment designed. We would suggest again giving students the chance to shine, asking them to make a presentation, asking them to do pretend interviews etc.

Each teaching PPT covers one Unit of the book, the PPT gives a flow already, similar to a teaching plan, please refer to the teaching plan sample for time control reference. There is material outside of the PPT that you can use to organise the activities. Each of the activities is designed to engage students with practising 听说读写, but all should be organised as student-centred 学生练. There is much less teaching 老师教 in this level, take a step back, take good control of the flow, give clear instructions to do each activity, and have fun talking with your students.

PPT 课件 & Activities

100% Chinese

每周新闻 – We recommend teachers to ask students to talk about weekly news headlines, what’s happening in the world, what is happening in China or among their lives. It’s impossible to prepare material beforehand, we would suggest glance over BBC 中文版 or Financial Times 中文版, to talk about some headlines for 10-20 minutes before class.

讲来听听 – On our prepared lesson PPT, warm up questions to introduce the main topic of the lesson, it’s like 打开话匣子.

对话卡: 6 questions related to the theme of each lesson. You can use it in multiple ways at different stages of a lesson. For instance, they can be used as warm-up questions at the beginning of a lesson, or they can be used after done reading each lesson’s text. Students can be divided into small groups to answer different questions first. Later, a summary, compare and contrast of their answers can be encouraged to share in front of the whole class.

阅读理解- Because HSK text is rather long, if you ask your students to read it in one go, it will take too long and it’s exhausting. Instead, we tend to break them down into a few sections, ask students to read in pairs, answer the questions provided, learn the new words, before moving on to the next section.

复述课文- Each slide contains several words selected from the sections divided. Students are asked to retell the story based on the words cue. It’s an effective way to revise words and a good output exercise after reading.

Practice

Practice

生词卡 & 看图说话: We intentionally bring in the new words introduction as games before the start of reading tasks. The 生词卡 contains new words from the lesson, but not all. Students can start to learn about them with games like 你说我猜, 看图说话。

生词讲解:  New words appear on PPT are extracted from the reading, can help students recognise and learn how to use these words. Since the lesson is conducted in Chinese, you can expand to any example sentences relevant to the class.

汉字摩天轮:  This can be a fun competition. Teacher will need to choose a few Hanzi from the lesson, for example, 常，and students to write down how many words they know use this Hanzi, like 经常，通常，常常 etc.

Liven Up

Quizlet: Online Quizlet flashcards created for each lesson. You can click the “live” function and let students play against each other in class as a way to end a lesson. You can also assign it as homework. Be careful, to play Quizlet, students need to use their own device connected to the internet. Also, try the Quizlet link provided before class and make sure it works for you.

问题大挑战: 12 questions regarding vocabulary, useful expressions and topic of each lesson. It’s again a quick listen and answer game, and it’s a much-loved game by PM students. Again, you can organise it S to S, or T to S. Bells and penalty cards are also available to pick up from the head office to make the game more fun.

Board games or any other games: from time to time, you will need to bring in games to play in the lesson, to make your students interested and engaged. Think about what games or activities you could have played with your friends, and bring them to class, treat your students like your friends! Some teachers even 包汤圆 with the students!

For this level, we didn’t make original videos for them. Since students might be able to understand a bigger part of an original Chinese video. So we can source these videos online, watch the video with students, ask questions and interact.

中文剧场: YouTube videos related to the topic of each lesson, usually with Chinese/English subtitles available. It is a great way to consolidate and expand students’ vocabulary on a specific topic. It can be used as a cue for classroom discussion or homework. These videos are also available with additional script tools in our E-learning platform.

对话小剧场: Our idea is to let students watch a famous TV or movie scene, it could be in English. After watching the students can act out the characters, but of course speaking in Chinese!

Videos & Articles

Output

写作会或辩论会: Ask students to write an article as homework and the teacher will provide feedback to each student.

阅读会: send some interesting online articles for students to read and talk about in the following lesson.

As you can see, there are loads of teaching resources available in each lesson. Feel free to mix and match and organise the teaching flow the way you find suitable for students’ language level and learning ability. Also, each lesson’s teaching flow does not always need to be the same. The diversified formats can bring more excitement and fun in the classroom.

As Chinese teachers, we need to continuously develop our subject knowledge regarding the Chinese language and culture. This is especially prominent for our HSK 5 and HSK 6 teachers. I summarise five aspects that we need to pay special attention to 1) English and Chinese vocabulary – students often ask “XX用中文怎么说？.” From this level on, some of the words they ask can be really hard. Being able to consistently answer their questions regarding this can help you to win their respect as a subject expert; 2) Grammar – although grammar is not taught in this level, they still have many questions regarding it; 3) Chinese idioms 成语, proverbs 俗语 and their stories behind. For instance, do you know the story behind the expression “炒鱿鱼？” 4) New expressions and internet slang 热词和网络流行词 – update our vocabulary and keep it up with the new trends, for instance, what is “凡尔赛?” 5) Current affairs 时事 – read Chinese news and keep up with the new societal and cultural changes and trends, for instance, what is “双减政策?”

To bring excitement to students, for HSK 5 onward classes, it’s highly recommended to use some English boardgames, by just changing the language.

Games like Chameleon, Codename we have in the headoffice, feel free to suggest buying new games!

It’s proven to be much loved by students, who don’t want to play and learn at the same time?