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 4 textbooks might be hard for them to read. This could be challenging, and it requires the teacher to give some help, like offering the reading material with Pinyin, or pair students up to help each other etc.

Another thing you may find is some students can understand your question like 你觉得精神健康重要吗？ But they will struggle to come up with answers more than a one-liner. Thus, the teacher can guide their speaking with more scaffolding questions like 如果你每天都不开心，那会影响你的工作吗？ So students can continue to engage in the conversation.

At this level, we are not learning grammar. Some students might still struggle with sentence structures. Also to tell one’s opinion on a topic, it’s more common to use 复句 with logical conjunctions etc. Teachers should pick up the opportunity when suited to help them revise the sentence structures and do some drills. For example, 对…的印象不好, 被…影响了.

Another good tip is to train students to navigate around words they haven’t learnt. The skill to become an independent speaker is to use alternative ways for the message. For example, the word student would like to say is 快递, but they can also say 送包裹的人。

There are some translation tasks in this level, instead of doing single sentences, they are doing a small paragraph. Students might try to translate them word by word, which will come out wrong or funny, it’s important to guide them to think beyond the individual words, try to grasp the meaning of the whole sentence, and then try to express the message as a whole. Or 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. This is followed by a brief introduction to PM methods (the Total Fluency Course slide). For ice breaking, 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, it’s always exciting to talk to someone new.

Term End: An end of term quiz can be used as a fun way to review what has been taught in a term. You can organise a different kind, like 识字, 组词, 词汇挑战, 中翻英, 听力, 辩论, 趣味心理测验, or play a super fun board game.

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

Throughout

This level we are trying to create the class as a truly immersive class with our native speaker videos throughout the class.

Three Part Videos + Mingle Cards

The videos and cards are all based on the same questions, teachers can warm up the students by answering the questions first, then watch the videos to see how a native speakers would answer to these questions. At the same time, it’s also native natural speech for listening practice. Bear in mind – some videos are easy while some can be difficult, use them depending on the level of your class. Also discussion first or listening first is your choice.

前菜 –  they are the type of questions that ask about personal experience, can be answered quick and simple, like 你是个爱浪漫的人吗? Students at this early stage of the lesson without learning the vocabularies might just answer these questions with simple answers. Thus they are great for warming up to the lesson topic at the very beginning.

主菜 – is the type of the questions that will require some organised thought to answer, heavy-weight questions like 你觉得结婚重要吗? These questions are more thought-provoking and could be controversial, but that’s the reason why students could have something to say. Thus they are arranged at the middle of the Unit, so students would have some vocabularies to use.

甜品 – is the type of questions that ask for a personal story, like 说说你最喜欢的一部爱情电影. These questions will again be good chitchatting topics. Students can talk about any of their personal stories, so it’s not a controlled discussion, ideally to be placed at the end of the Unit learning.

讲来听听 – Warm-up questions to introduce the topic or question related to the texts from the HSK 4 coursebook you will assign your students to read next.

Text Reading – There are 3 conversations for reading practice in the HSK 4 textbook, before reading set a task for students, to find out answers for 3 questions. After reading, if students can answer these questions correctly, that means they got it. You can continue to talk about vocabularies and grammar points in these texts.

Vocabulary on PPT – Each slide contains a new word, related or similar words, example sentences; bear in mind some students can’t read Hanzi, encourage the ones who can to read the sentences out, or teacher might have to help. You might end up spending quite a lot of time on this if you don’t control it well. There is no need to go through every word in the same amount of time, tackle the difficult ones, and pass through the easy ones.

Grammar 句型语法 – there is no structural grammar knowledge to learn in HSK 4, so most of these are about particular words and their particular uses.

Part 1

Liven Up

After reading the 3 texts and all the vocabularies, students would be quite drained by now. It’s time to introduce some games to liven up the class!

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.

Translation Club – we have translated the last 2 texts on the HSK 4 textbook back to English, and we ask students to translate them back to Chinese. You can do this either in class, work in pairs. Or as Homework. This exercise is quite good, as it helps students to avoid speaking Chinglish, and make sentences closer to Chinese patterns. That said, as long as their sentences make sense, it’s ok to pass. At the end, ask them to read the Chinese original texts on the book, they would find out the difference of use of language on their own.

Vocabulary on PPT – Each slide contains a new word, related or similar words, example sentences; bear in mind some students can’t read Hanzi, encourage the ones who can to read the sentences out, or teacher might have to help. You might end up spending quite a lot of time on this if you don’t control it well. There is no need to go through every word in the same amount of time, tackle the difficult ones, and pass through the easy ones.

Grammar 句型语法 – there is no structural grammar knowledge to learn in HSK 4, so most of these are about particular words and their particular uses.

Part 2

Practice

Vocabulary cards & Pictures : Vocabulary cards containing Pinyin, Hanzi and English explanation. You can use it in multiple ways. For instance, they can be used it for 看图说话 (match the cards with the pictures and make a sentence to tell the relation), or  你说我猜 (ask students to use other words or actions to describe a word, the others guess).

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.

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. Also, try the Quizlet link provided before class and make sure it works for you.

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.

造句练习: Putting words in right order. It can be a bit challenging for our students if they can’t read Hanzi or forget the words. Students can work in pairs or individually, they can say the answer out or type them into the class WhatsApp group.

Students would be speaking mostly in Chinese in this class, so the upgraded fluency output practise is to encourage them to express with more organised thoughts. The method we use is by asking more abstract and logical questions.

Discussion: the mingle cards provide the same questions they are presented to the native speakers in the videos, as well as 讲来听听 before each story reading are all open questions asking for class discussions.

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. This of course can be done in groups, give them enough time to prepare their speeches, and give them time to express, it’s almost all student led, teachers can just be the host and help.

Discussion & Debates

Transactions: the last two texts from the textbooks have been translated to English, so students can do the 英翻中 as a practise, and compare their translation to the original texts.

Writing Club: this writing topic is related to the debate, if you have done the debate in class, ask the students to write their speeches properly in writing.

Reading Club: PM written articles especially suitable for students’ current level. While covering each lesson 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. This can be used as homework, or as speed reading 快速阅读 test, read in 10 mins and answer the 5 questions.

Culture Club: send students a relevant video from Youtube or other online source, have a watch of the real life story or cultural phenomenon.

A few 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. We also find jazzing the flow differently sometimes will increase students’ engagement.

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 – translation (first week), reading club, writing club (second week), and of course vocabulary reviews on their Quizlet flashcard apps. Some teacher will assign easier homework like 句子排序 for weaker class.

Assign different questions to different students based on difficulty level. 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.

Skip some activities like Lego or video listening if you find suitable, focus on helping your class practise on what they are weak at, and what they want to be good at.