INTERACTION

I found a video giving an example of how you can order food in a Chinese restaurant and ask how much they cost. In my opinion, the video would require two kinds of interaction from my students, which are learner-content interaction and learner-learner interaction. It requires learner-content interaction because learners have to understand what the video is talking about and then they can interact with other students based on the video. It forces them to respond in some ways as the activity is to have a conversation with others. They are likely to respond to the video by taking notes or some ideas that are inspired by the video because the video summarizes some words and sentence patterns that learners can use. I would suggest that they find a partner and take turns role-playing to imitate the conversation in the video with one person being a customer and another person being a server.

It is better if they can create a new conversation based on the sentence patterns offered by the video. This kind of activity boosts their memorization of sentence patterns as well as vocabulary and enhances their speaking and writing skills in Chinese. It also cultivates the ability for creativity. The most important is that students get a chance to practice those words and sentences over and over again, which enables them to use them naturally and confidently in daily life. This is a great activity to do in an offline classroom; however, if this activity takes place online, they might have to use YouTube to watch the video and any platforms like zoom to meet their partners to practice the conversation. Students can record the conversation by using zoom or any other medium that supports this function and upload videos to YouTube. The video that they uploaded do not need to be public as long as people who have the link can watch it, and the feedback they received from peers and instructors will be posted on platform like Brightspace.