Chinese Teaching Strategies: Doing Self-Introduction

What do you teach in the first lesson of your Chinese class? How do you help your students gain interests in the Chinese language and learn Chinese at ease? With more than three years experiences in teaching Chinese as a second language, I would like to share my instructional strategy of teaching self-introduction in my Chinese classroom. When I taught in Harmony Tree Learning Center, a summer camp Chinese program in east LA,, this approach worked well with  my beginner and intermediate students aging from 6 to 13 years old, and provided easy steps to  learn Chinese number, nationality, and personal pronounces.

2. Form-focused Instruction: Vocabulary  

Sentence Structure

• 你好。

• 我____岁。

• 我叫________。

• 我读____年级。

• 我是____国人。

3. Practice: pair work

Divide students into pairs and have students  introduce themselves to their partners using the sentence structure provided.

4. Form-focused Instruction: Grammar

Explain to students how personal pronoun will affect sentence structure, using "这是…" (This is ...) instead of "我叫" (I am ...), "他/她" (S/He) instead of "我" (I). For example, “大家好，这是…他/她 几岁。他/她 读几年级。他/她 是美国人。” If you have a small-sized class with sufficient class time, you could ask every student to introduce their partners in front of the whole class.

Reflection