Ever heard the phrase: "The best way to learn is to teach,”? In this project, we did just that: teach. For this project, we had to play the part of a Chinese teacher who teaches a basic Chinese class. Working with two other students, we were to draft and perform a skit and we could speak nothing but Chinese in the skit. First we had to come up with the idea we wanted to use for our skit, then we had to draft our skit in English and Chinese. After we finalized our script, we memorized each part individually and then finished the project by recording the skit and assembling the parts in movie maker.

 

The purpose of this project was to reinforce the basic classroom expressions that we need to understand to be able to function in a Chinese learning setting. Not only do we have to understand what the phrases mean, but we also need to know when and how to use them as well as how to modify them to give us a phrase that says what we want to say. Also, just speaking the language over and over allows us to naturally improve our fluency of the language as a whole.

 

The quality that was emphasized the most over the course of this project was (ironically) communication. Not only did we have to translate between two languages, but we also had to communicate our ideas and problems to each other. During the course of this project, my group was only all together for only two days when we did our recordings. All of the planning and scripting of the skit was done via email because at least one of my group members was absent each day. The artifact shows how much we communicated by showing all of our different styles incorporated into the final draft even though we did this without meeting each other face to face to draft it. Nic Davis incorporated lines such as “No Chinese. Qué!? Welche!? Nini!? 什么!?!?” to give himself the chance to play the part of an delinquet, while Emily incorporated lines such as “老师，现在九点十分， 我们可以去滑冰吗?” so that she didn’t have to yell as much. These different styles are clearly shown throughout the script and show how well we communicated.

 

Another quality that I grew in over the course of this project was persistence. Since my group was never together, to memorize their lines, I had to read the script over and over for both of them individually so that they could memorize their lines in the order that they would say them in the actual script, so I had to play the part of two different people at least 20 times each!

 

Video Link: http://youtube/LEPkxTR4lm4