2016.0316
Alumnus Tseng Miao Fen Leads Chinese Education in USA
In the March issue of Business Weekly, the alumnus of the English Department of NTNU, Tseng Miao fen, was introduced because of her outstanding career in Chinese teaching. Dr. Tseng is the first Chinese director and key trainer of the STARTALK Teacher Program at the University of Virginia. Her books are highly welcomed by Chinese teachers in the states and she is listed in the Who's Who in America Education.
The Chinese course by Dr. Tseng is hard to apply. The acceptance rate is only 1%. Her revolutionary teaching strategy of flipped classroom has attracted school teachers and professors to register. Dr. Tseng was born and raised in Taiwan and now she become one of the most important figure in Chinese teaching in the United States. Graduated as the top of the Department of English in NTNU, the two books she wrote “AP Chinese Language and Culture Teacher's Guide” and “AP Chinese Course Planning Guide” are textbooks for the Advanced Placement Chinese Program in US.
The secret of her effective Chinese training courses is that she teaches Chinese in Chinese only, giving the students a Chinese only environment. The Institute of World Languages is special is that students with no background in Chinese can achieve the level of a 1 year learner in 10 days. “In recent years, we use this method of blended learning, which is flipped classroom combining face to face teaching.” She said that the key to be teaching efficiently is to give the students her course pack and see their feedbacks. 9 categories are taught in 10 days. Before students coming to the classroom, they should have seen three Chinese videos and did those online interactive exercises. For example, a 30 second ad by singer Jay Chou and basketball player Kobe Bean Bryant is one of the course materials.
Also, after the students watched the video and submitted their notes, they will get a multiple choices. The teacher can know how far the students understand from the answers they submit and the students will get the feedback of the correct answers. Dr. Tseng said that with that video vied beforehand, the student will learn more quickly in class.
When the students enter the classroom, what comes to their eyes is not a blackboard, but different settings according to the categories. For example, a airport setting so that students can practicing speaking Chinese with the airport staff. If they want to talk about Shilin night market, she will play a video about the night market and tell them the culture about bargaining so that students will understand the cultural differences. She said that in the real scenario, students can learn all aspect of a language, rather than reading and writing only.
After Advanced Placement Chinese Program, Dr. Tseng is introducing an online Chinese learning environment, that is, every students in all across America can be indulged in a real learning scenario and interact with the instructor online, building an online community.