The Class Design Of Overseas Chinese Class Which Based On The Audio-lingual Method

Audio-lingual method is a classic methodology of teaching a second language. It’s based on structural linguistics and behaviorism. Audio-lingual has its own advantages to maintain popularity even when many new language teaching methods are appearing:The student by receiving from the teacher with the ear, then repeating with the mouth, gives the audio-lingual method the primary listening-speaking teaching purpose.The students of Confucius Institute at the University of Newcastle are mostly from the local community. They work during the day and come to our Confucius Institute to learn Chinese during night time. They only have two hours of class per week and they have no language environment to practice during the week. This presents a very big challenge for our Chinese teaching methods. I worked as a Chinese volunteer teacher in the Confucius Institute at the University of Newcastle for a year and based on my observations and methods used I consider lots of new teaching methods like communicative teaching approach or task-based language teaching are not suitable for them. Hence I think choosing a right method of teaching Chinese should depends on different situations. And facing some challenging teaching environments, the teacher should go back to some classical methods sometimes.This essay is mainly focusing on the characteristic of audio-lingual method and the theory of class design, the teaching and learning situation when applied to the Intermediate Chinese class in the Confucius Institute at the University of Newcastle. Aspects also considered are the class design, the real situation in class according to the class design and some perspective of it. Five chapters are included:In Chapter one, I mainly talked the background and meaning of this topic by introducing audio-lingual method and how to use it in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages.In Chapter two, I will introduce the situation of the Intermediate Chinese class in the Confucius Institute at the University of Newcastle by talking about the learning motivation of our students, their levels of Chinese, the information of our teachers and the use of the textbooks.In Chapter three, I will choose one lesson from the textbook we use, design that lesson and putting efforts on the important & difficult points, the teaching tools and the process of class.In Chapter four, I will try to discuss how audio-lingual method impact on the design of Intermediate Chinese class. I will describe the situation in real class and pay some thinking to the observation and the feedback from the students.In Chapter five, I will give a summarization and a conclusion of the whole essay, point out the disadvantage of it and the assumption of this research.