On 12, June 2020, to improve online Chinese teaching, USTB-DMU Confucius Institute (CI) had the honour to invite Dr. Jo Rushworth to deliver a flipped learning webinar teaching basic numbers in Chinese. She is an associate professor in biochemistry at DMU learning Chinese with the CI for just one and a half years.

Pic 1 - Pre-sessional webinar video for remote self-learning

Dr. Rushworth has been learning Mandarin with CI teachers Jia Hou and Zhiping Wei. She was one of the youngest winners of a British National Teaching Fellowship (NTF) in 2018 for her unconventional lecturing methods that engage students. The fellowship celebrates individuals who have made an outstanding impact on student outcomes and the teaching profession in higher education in the UK.

Pic 2 - Live lecture 1 - Mandarin Chinese for beginners

Dr. Rushworth’s webinar comprises two parts. In the first half, she asked the attendees to do multi-task learning activities and group-work tasks to reinforce their pre-sessional learning, as her pre-sessional webinar video was posted online days before the webinar. Her video presents basic introduction of the Chinese language such as pictographic character, the distribution of Chinese-speaking people across the world, pinyin, the four tones, strokes and order of strokes, numbers in Chinese, memorization tricks and tips, images of Tiantan and flag of China. All those pre-sessional tasks she helped her attendees to review in class for the best achievable results. Her engaging and challenging multi-tasks included identifying and circling numbers in Chinese, spelling them out and adding tones to them, etc.

Pic 3 - Material for multi-task classroom learning activities

In the second half, attendees were invited to reflect on their experience through the student lens and with their lecturer hat on. They shared how they felt about being a remote learner in a flipped Mandarin learning webinar. Topics such as what works well, what could the teacher improve, and how this experience might influence their own pedagogy were excitedly discussed.

Pic 4 - Dr Rushworth's acknowledgements to the CI and her teachers

As the saying goes, teaching benefits students as well as teachers. Dr. Rushworth has shown us how an interactive online flipped Chinese class could be like. The CI teachers also shared their reflections with Dr Rushworth after the webinar. What has inspired them most was that Mandarin could be better taught in the perspective of an English-speaker since she has discerned more similarities and established more connections between the two languages, especially in terms of pronunciation and grammar. The CI teachers came to a consensus that online teaching could be more inviting if better designed if standing in the learners’ shoes. A successful online Chinese class like this demo will surely engage Chinese learners.

Dr. Rushworth has rated USTB-DMU CI and the teachers at the CI as “THE BEST” and extremely dedicated and wonderful, in one of her Twitter tweets. Her Chinese webinar has caused a sensation across the university, her attendees tweeting and retweeting congratulations and expectations.

(Draft: Wei Zhiping; Editor: Yang Yingjun)