Research On Mandarin Teaching Of Bohunt School Confucius Classroom In The UK

Bohunt school has introduced Mandarin to Modern foreign language curriculum since 2011 and is relatively mature with more than five years of development,such as its rich Mandarin staff resources,significant increase in the number of students learning Mandarin and the excellent Mandarin GCSE results.However,there are still some problems need to be solved,for instance,the decreasing number of students form Key stage 3 to Key stage 4,classroom management,differentiation and teacher training and development.With two years of teaching practice at Bohunt as a Hanban volunteer teacher,I have developed a deep understanding of the Mandarin teaching situation at Bohunt by constant observation and teaching practice.Firstly,this paper presents a whole picture of Mandarin teaching of Bohunt,including its teaching environment,Mandarin staff,students,teaching objectives,scheme of work,textbooks and assessment.Followed by an analysis of its advantages in teaching environment and staff resources,while pointing out areas such as assessment criteria that need to be adjusted.Secondly,a questionnaire survey was conducted to study and get a deep understanding of students' learning interests,targets,attitudes and needs.There is also a contrast analysis of the surv ey results of the three different types of Mandarin classes,including the Lower year,CLIL and GCSE.Lastly,in order to study the difficulties that teachers confront,the pressure they undertook,the kind of training they expect to receive,and students learning difficulties from teachers'perspectives,five Mandarin teachers were invited to participate in an interview survey.Overall,it is hoped that this paper will be able to make some contribution to the further improvement of the Mandarin teaching at Bohunt and even other secondary schools in the UK.The paper contains five chapters as follows:First chapter gives an overview of the whole study,defining the study objectives,while explaining the origin,values,and methods adopted.Second chapter is literary review,which presents the previous research findings and the analyses of them.Third chapter presents a whole picture of the Mandarin teaching situation at Bohunt school,including teaching environment,supply of teacher,students,Mandarin scheme of work,textbook and assessment.Fourth chapter is the analysis of the results of students' questionnaire survey and teacher' interview survey.First is the survey design,which introduces the objectives,targets and methods of the survey.Following is the analysis and conclusion of both the questionnaire survey and teacher's interview results.Fifth,also the last chapter provides a summary of the key findings of the research and points out the limitations.The key findings are as follows:As regards students,it reveals remarkable differences with respect to learning interests,attitudes and objectives among CLIL,GCSE and lower year Mandarin classes;The amount of target language used by teachers is conformable with students' learning need;Students are in low expectation of using textbook during the lesson;Many students hold a neutral view on the idea of increasing Mandarin culture teaching.With regard to teachers,the main sources of teaching difficulties and pressure are:poor attitudes of some students,differentiation,classroom management and workload;From teachers' point of view,students'learning difficulties reflect on pronunciation,character writing,accumulation of words and grammar;Although sufficient training programmes are provided for native teachers and training teachers,there is a lack of support for Hanban teachers.Trainings on classroom management and differentiation,as well as more opportunities of class observation are expected by the majority of teachers.