Exploring Task-Based Pbl in an Elective Chinese Language Beginner Course in a Danish Context

Exploring Task-Based Pbl in an Elective Chinese Language Beginner Course in a Danish Context

XIANGYUN DU, Youjin Ruan

Chinese as an Asian language is still very new to most institutions in Denmark, it is facing both opportunities and challenges in a Danish context. Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University (AAU) has been offering different elective language courses, such as English, French, German and Spanish, and started to include Chinese language course which is taught by the Chinese teachers from Confucius Institute for Innovation and Learning at Aalborg University’s (CI) from 2011. In autumn semester 2012, the number of students in Chinese classes broke record, 174 students chose to study Chinese, which made Chinese the biggest language program at the university. And the students are from different studies, such as health, engineering, computer science, humanities and others. However, most of foreign language courses in Department of Culture and Global Studies are still facing a high rate of drop-out problem. We agree with Gardner R. C. that students’ motivation plays an important role in the teaching and learning process. What may affect Danish student’s motivation in the foreign language learning? How to meet Danish student’s expectation in a foreign language course? How to motivate them to learn a new foreign language, such as Chinese, by using alternative teaching methods? How to motivate them by integrating language and cultural elements in the language teaching and learning? How to maintain the quality of foreign language teaching and learning with a big amount of participants? To develop and sustain the Chinese language and culture teaching in AAU, the researchers and teachers from CI have been developing a student-centred teaching and learning method Task-based PBL (Xiangyun DU & Mads Jakob Kirkebæk, 2012) in this course, by means of a qualitative research approach weare investigatingthis course and try to find the answers to the questions mentioned above.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1818