Pedagogical Approach
The Interactive Chinese Grammar lessons were designed to be flexible and used in a variety of contexts. Most notably, they can serve a flipped classroom approach, in which structures are explained and practiced outside of class, so that students can use valuable class time for communicative activities. They also serve a functional approach to a Chinese curriculum, allowing learners to focus on structure as a foundation for further language development. Finally, they serve to foster independent learning. Learners use them to preview a single grammatical structure, to supplement classroom instruction, to review material or to refer to as reference material at any point in their Chinese learning process, including upper-level content courses.
The materials include twenty units, grouped thematically and according to linguistic complexity. Students have the opportunity to work with the material as complete novice learners and progress through the units toward an intermediate level of proficiency. The content is equivalent to the first year of postsecondary Chinese instruction. The availability of the material, coupled with the limited (2-6 minutes) presentation focused on one single structure per mini-lesson encourages student engagement and agency.
Enhanced Student Learning
Students can reinforce and demonstrate their learning through up to three exercises per mini-lesson, available through PlayPosit. In order to make the content, along with the comprehension exercises widely available, the “quiz” responses are not recorded, but they include feedback to the learner with guidelines on reviewing the mini-lesson if needed. Chinese instructors are not bound by the included exercises. They may create their own, either within their own PlayPosit or similar account, simply accessing the videos from the YouTube channel. In addition, instructors may embed the videos within a course management system and create their own quizzes in order to monitor student comprehension through recorded quiz responses. Instructors can also provide students access to the YouTube channels, which in turn can promote individualized learning and self-regulation.