The Students

At this level, students‘ levels would vary. We commonly see Cantonese speakers or students who have been to China would have better fluency skills, while others might be a bit slower in responding to the teacher speaking Chinese only, and slow to speak up. Thus, it is important for the teacher to tailor the questions and tasks for different students and keep them stay engaged and motivated.

Another issue is with Hanzi, some students might have a good level of Hanzi reading, some might not at all. The HSK 3 textbook still provides texts in pinyin and students in need can use it. However, they might the main PPTs are hard to read. The teacher might need to give some help, like offering the reading material with Pinyin, or pair students up to help each other etc.

Some students may struggle with challenging grammar points introduced at this level, such as 把字句 or 被字句. The teacher can use English to explain grammar points. More examples and drills can be used.

The level of language used in videos can be vary. So, check it before class and decide which parts can be played to your students’ level. Also, some additional assistance might be needed to help them to understand the videos. Such as introduction to some the new words used.

There are some sentence translation tasks at this level. Some students find them easy; some still struggle. You can assist them to figure out how to say each individual word, and then put those words into a sentence.

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The Materials

Term Start & Term End

Term Start: Firstly, to tell students the learning objectives of this level (if new) and this term. Followed by a brief introduction of PM methods (the Total Fluency Course slide). For ice breaking, especially the class has new students or they have been away for some time, we recommend doing Mingle Small Talks – there are conversation cards to be used printed or digital, hand them out to students to chat to each other, ask the class to change partners every couple of minutes, it’s always exciting to talk to someone new. Can also start with small games, like vocabulary Charades, 听力抢答 with penalty cards etc to liven up the class.

Term End: There are a few Kahoot Assessments available for each of the term, designed to test students’ reading, listening and Hanzi in a fun way. Term-end vocabulary challenge, debate and 问题大挑战 are also available to use.

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

Induction + Reading + Grammar + Kahoot

Induction 导入 – One or two warm-up questions to introduce the main grammar of the lesson.

Text reading and grammar examples extracting – There are 4 texts for reading practice in the HSK3 textbook. Before reading, set a task for students to find out phrases with certain grammatical or semantic features, for example, find out all the “verb+好” to say “I’m done with doing …”.  The texts in HSK books are rather dry and not easy to follow, so the main task for students would be just to read and understand enough, find the examples of the grammar pattern, that’s it. Should not spend more than 20 mins on this. Once all the examples are identified, you can continue to talk about the key grammar points of each unit.

Grammar Tutorial and Drill – Grammar points need to be explained clearly in simple English and we should not dwell on each point too long. Encourage students to put what they’ve learnt into practice by doing YES or No activity (to decide whether the sentences listed are grammatically correct or not), playing Build the Sentences and describe pictures with the suggested words or expressions. Once all grammar points of the lesson done, a Kahoot game can be played as assessment.

Kahoot: Online Kahoot game created for each lesson. This is a much-loved activity by PM students. It can be used at the end of a lesson to assess students’ progress and help them to recap the important vocabulary. Be careful, to play Kahoot, students need to use their own device connected to internet. For online students, they might need to use their phone or a second screen.

Vocabulary on PPT – Each slide contains a set of related words or words from the same categories, by associating the words with other words they learnt, it helps to strengthen understanding and memory. Go through those words in an interactive way, prompt students with questions more than teach.

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 internet. Make sure you have the link already open before the class, to save the “looking for it” time.

Vocabulary cards + Pictures: Vocabulary cards containing Pinyin, Hanzi, some with English explanation. You can use it in multiple ways. For instance, they can be used for Charades (word guessing game, 你说我猜). Assign each student 3 cards. Ask one student to describe one word in Chinese without mentioning the word and let the rest of the students guess the word. (To lower the difficulty, you can open the 生词卡 PDF and leave it on the screen.) Secondly, to use these cards with the pictures for Mix & Match, you can ask students to match the words with the pictures, and make a sentence to tell the connection.

Picture Talk: match the phrases with the pictures

Fill in the blanks: now the students are familiar with the words, fill in the sentences with the right words.

Sentence Workshop: ten sentences for translation, you can do that in class, ask one student to do one or two sentences and send to your class what’sapp group, or do this as homework.

Workshop

Workshop

汉字 Bingo: The rule is that students cross the word after the command from the teacher and the first one who has a line wins. There are many ways you can use a Bingo sheet to help your students to recap each unit. 1）Bingo X Listening: The teacher will say a sentence in Chinese that contains the target word to see if students are able to capture the word in that sentence; the Teacher will say words one by one in English 2）Bingo X Sentence-Building: Within a limited time (one minute) to see how many words that students can use in their sentence. The more, the merrier.

汉字 Lego: This activity is designed to reinforce students’ words recognition. Physical sets are contained in our teacher’s pack. Different sets can be given to different students or teams. Ask them to put all the character cards available into words. If teach online, can open the Hanzi Lego file and show students 2 sets of characters one after another. For each set, give them 2 minutes and ask them to make as many words as they can. When time is up, can find out who’s got the most words.

Vocabulary Builder: The next two activities are trying to teach students that one Hanzi can be used to build multiple words, for example, 电 – 电视，电话，电脑… or two words can be combined into one, 旅游 + 客人 = 游客。

Real Stories 真人真故事 –  This is the most original part of PM lessons for this level. One video by native speakers to answer the Mingle Cue Card questions. It’s in a way for students to see how a native speaker would answer these questions and learn something from them. At the same time, it’s also native natural speech for listening practice. Thus, these videos can be used in combination with the Mingle Cue Card.  Discussion first or listening first is your choice. Bear in mind – some videos are easy while some can be difficult, use them depending on the level of your class. Transcripts of these videos are also available to download for students.

Pair listening: Five listening comprehension questions. It can be conducted S to S, or T to S. One person reads out the paragraph, the other listen and decide if the statement is true or false.

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.

Practice

Output Practise

Mingle Cards: 4 guiding questions to assist students to form a coherent paragraph to talk about the topic in discussion. These questions will again be good chitchatting topics.

Debate Club: We introduce a controversial topic, to engage students with thoughts and opinions, let students choose a side and articulate why they support the side.

Story Making: Ask students to work in pairs or groups, look at the pictures and keywords provided, to make a story by using them.

Other Activities: 你说我猜 is a game we use for Level 4, but strong Level 3 students can have a go, and some teachers for online lessons can use a bit more games like Nearpod or Wordwall.

Sentence Workshop – Ask students to translate sentences from English to Chinese. Guiding words and expressions can be provided; they can work in pairs or together with the teacher if time is a concern.

Graded Reader: PM written articles especially suitable for students’ current level. While covering each lesson’s topic and vocabulary, it also helps to expand students’ vocabulary bank. However, some students might find this challenging and have questions about how to use some of the supplementary words. Story reading can be used as homework. Send students the file and you might need to prepare simple questions to check their understanding the following week.

Writing CLub –  Tell your own story! Follow similar topics of our immersive video and our graded reader, and our mingle card, students now have done enough practise, to be able to tell a story of their own, and the teacher will provide feedback to each student.

Options

As you can see, there are loads of teaching resources available in each lesson. You can follow the teaching flow suggested by each lesson’s course PPT. However, also feel free to mix and match and organise the teaching flow the way you find it suitable for students’ language level and learning ability. We find ending each class with a competitive game, such as Kahoot, Quizlet or 问题大挑战, works well with our students.

Depending on your flow or your student’s strength and weakness, you can assign homework every week or every other week for them.

Some types of homework mentioned above are – Sentence Workshop (first week), Story Reading, Telling Your Story (second week), and of course vocabulary reviews (use of quizlet).

Assign different questions to different students based on the degree of difficulty.

Ask higher ability students to answer questions first and allow the lower ability students to absorb the questions and follow others’ examples.

Give the faster individuals or groups additional material/ tasks to work on, while providing support for the slower individuals or groups.