贤淇的天空: THE MANDARIN ORAL TEST FOR BEGINNERS Part II

2021年8月29日星期日

THE MANDARIN ORAL TEST FOR BEGINNERS Part II

THE MANDARIN ORAL TEST FOR BEGINNERS

Part II

LOI Hing Kee

Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Institute of Marine Engineering Technology (UniKL MIMET)

hkloi@unikl.edu.my

THE ADVANTAGES OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING

The cooperative learning allows students to see the advantages to be in the team. In order to achieve the academic goals, they must work in groups to complete tasks, they must have mutual care and understanding, learn together, work together. These lead to coexistence and common prosperity, at the same time, display friendship and solidarity, proactive, voluntary dedication of wisdom and teamwork. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Thus their collective consciousness, solidarity and cohesion getting stronger.

LISTENING TEST

The lecturer found that students can not recognize the Chinese characters or words6. So, besides Oral Exam, there are Listening Tests, with the intention to let them recognize the Chinese characters. The lecturer offered some common Chinese characters and words, beside the character and word have number or alphabet. Then, the lecturer let the students first learn the character forms, sound and meaning of the Chinese characters and words. During the test, no pinyin was provided. The lecturer used the characters they learned to make sentence or phrase and read out, the students listened carefully, then wrote the answer by using the numbers or alphabets next to the characters or words. In addition, they also listened to the words and matched with pictures.


Example of Listening Test

CONCLUSION

Many students scored high marks in oral test. For the group test, it seems not objective enough, could not obviously distinguish good and poor students. But the lecturer’s objective was to let them study seriously and mastered the skills was achieved. On the other hand, the individual Oral Test can clearly distinguish students’ achievement, and promptly corrected their weaknesses. The validity of individual Oral Test is very high also, but it take time to finish the test especially to test a big crowd of students in a limited time. It also compensate the disadvantages of the group test. The Listening Test is one of the means which can bring back the students to learn the Chinese character again. This new approach of oral test is suitable for courses which has relatively short learning time and has big crowd of students.

The students are allowed to finish the oral test in the lecturer’s office. This is the best time for them to arrange the suitable time to study, they can form the group according to their taste. They can come several times to test different item or items. If they fully implement it, that is the best chance for them to nurture “self-paced learning”7 which is very good for lifelong learning.

The lecturer changed oral test to become a musical baton, directing students to learn actively and seriously. For the sake of high marks, students actively and seriously concentrate on learning. The oral test is to examine or to measure how much they had learned and mastered, not to knock them down. It also measured whether the approach taken to teach is effective or vice-versa.