Putonghua Learning Enhancement Program–Creating and combining both virtual and real interactive environment to enhance Putonghua learning

Abstract

For the past decade, Hong Kong's proximity to Mainland China has accelerated the demand of Putonghua in all aspects. Although the University offers Putonghua classes of various levels, the students find it difficult to practice the language after class. Besides, the traditional Putonghua classroom teaching cannot meet the students' need of multimodal learning. Therefore, the aim of this project IS to fill the gap by introducing computer-aided Putonghua teaching in the existing mainstream university courses and offering Putonghua Salon for both students and staff members. Putonghua Salon, which has proved to be successful in providing face-to-face individual and group counseling service and various modes of practice. It 1s necessary to continue this good practice in the 2010-11 academic year. In the past year, the TDG-funded project has purchased GoChinese, a language learning package with integration capacity to CityU Blackboard system. The Principal Investigator of the present project has tried it out on a sample of around 150 students. An investigation has been conducted on the effect of the trial use of the package, and the preliminary results show that the technology use is positively correlated with students' motivation in learning Mandarin and their general examination scores.