Hello, everyone
I am looking forward to our upcoming break. I have spent more time in SL this week. I have chatted with the owner of Chinese Island. She is an Australian who teaches Chinese in a university. We shared a lot of interesting ideas and experiences on Chinese teaching and learning. After that conversation in virtual life, we have closer relationship in real life. It is such a delightful journey in SL. It is like you might never have the opportunity to meet someone who has similar thoughts, similar interests and even similar personality in real life. But yes, it happens. It happens in SL, a virtual world. Suddenly, you feel that the world is not that big.
The earth is just a ball which you can play around.
I have talked about this journey with my student who has learnt Chinese from me for half a year in Auckland. I invited him to join my little experiment. It is a task based learning experiment. It is just a casual experiment which based on our textbook that was brought by me from China. We plan that we learn a topic each week, than we go to SL Chinese Island to practice the new vocabulary which have learnt in this week. For instance, our topic for this week is ‘At café shop’, I will teach him some related words in real life, and then we will go to find a ‘tea house’ on Chinese Island to practice those vocabularies. After these, he will be asked to write a brief story according to those new words in Chinese. I asked him that there must be two main roles in his story, one is his avatar, and the other is my avatar (actually, I just designed this step for fun. Because I love story and I want him be creative and interesting about learning). Then I will write a ‘processing diary’ according to it. Currently, that is just our ideal thought; we are going to test it next week. I am knee on your advice. Good luck for us!
Qian
Hi Betty,
ReplyDeleteNice to see you're making friends in SL. However, when I visited the Chinese Island the other day, there was nobody there... Do you think it may not be possible for your Chinese student to interact with other avatars (if any) there & practice his Chinese?
This is the common problem that I find about SL, there's usually hardly anyone else in there...
Cheers
Albie
Hi Qian
ReplyDeleteDid you speak with the owner in Chinese or English out of interest? And did you use voice or text?
Also rather than get your student to write a story - you could get him/her to write a dialogue. This would avoid some of the issues involving writing narrative genres in Chinese - unless of course you are interested in this and it becomes part of the 'lesson'. All good stuff.