A friend sent this to me and its geared towards English, but these sorts of topics/questions could easily be changed to Chinese. Imagine the teacher asking each of the students the questions, or the students asking each other. Even if only a minute was spent on each question, it would easily fill an hour.
Idea #2:
If it was necessary to have an article(though I don’t see why it is), what about something like this, yes graded, but its the discussion that is important, not the article, so yes chairmans tao type articles could be used:
I haven’t taken one yet but I will try and get involved soon and give feedback. I think they’d definitely be better with two students just so you can bounce off each other but that’s my job to get more people using Flexi!! I can see how just 1-on-1 it becomes much more intense as you don’t get a moment to re-gather yourself after making a mistake or two, which can put you completely off track as we’ve all experienced.
Today in Free speaking we got through both articles and also spent a lot of time discussing culture in general. After this class, I have three suggestions (that seemed to work well during our trials with Emma):
Use a popup dictionary and hover over unfamiliar words while we’re reading the article. Not only it will speed up our reading but it would be good to see the pinyin/translation while the teacher pronounces it. (If you insist on the “zero English” policy then just use a Chinese to Chinese dictionary with pinyin).
Use an image search for the most important words/main points of the article. Images often tend to get stuck in the brain better than the best explanations.
Use the template and put the most important new words/grammar structures in the left column and example usages in the right column. Another teacher did that in the previous free speaking class. It didn’t take her too long to create and I could review the phrases later.
Overall, my experience was great. I think we’re getting really close to @Andreas_Admin_Flexi 's vision for these classes.
This learning platform is fantastic, better than expected. So thankful I finally found such a great resource. Just attended my first 4+ class with Amber Wei, along with @Ben-Mandarin-HSK_5 . Thank you!
Thanks so much for the praise and welcome to the forum @mulanOfTech-Mandarin
It’s great to have you with us. If you need help or have any questions just create a post and we will reply straight away.
I have a request/suggestion for the free-speaking classes. Could we add the links to the readings under “Additional Resources” in addition to being in the class PDF? That way we can access the articles without having to download the PDF.
I’m also not sure why we’re given links to the homepage followed by screenshots with instructions on how to navigate to the specific article. Homepages change all the time so it’s always really hard to find the article that we’re supposed to discuss. Why not just give us the direct link to the article in question?
For example, I have the free-speaking class on art in a little bit and I just have the link to the homepage 央视网才艺_央视网 but I have no idea how to find the article we’re supposed to be reading.
This has happened in prior classes and we usually just choose a random article or the teacher just screenshares if she is able to find it.
You could always ask the teacher to send you the link to the article you’re reading in Zoom chat.
I think we can’t have a permanent link to the actual article because we’re supposed to read a different article every time so the link always changes. We could probably have a link to the main website in Additional resources though and just click on the first article ourselves.
Also, it happened to me before that I previewed the wrong article before the class but maybe that’s not a bad thing anyway?
I’m confused, so are we supposed to read the exact article that is being pointed to in the screenshot, or are we supposed to read whatever article is in the place that’s being pointed to in the screenshot?
I always thought it was the former, but maybe now that you put it that way I may have just misunderstood.
In either case, I think there should be an easier way for us to access the articles before class just so we can try to give them a quick read before class starts. I’ve also found a lot of technical issues with many of the websites, so just testing them out to see if I can open them before class is helpful as well.
i’ve had this exact same issue twice. both times i was about to book a speaking class, but decided not to for this exact reason. the only reason i’m speaking out about it now is because someone else has already had the same problem. the only way i’m booking an hsk 4+ speaking class is if i can read the article beforehand. as a heritage speaker, my chinese character recognition ain’t good enough to read an article with no pinyin on the fly. so until we get direct links or an easy way to find the articles beforehand, i’m not booking any hsk 4+ speaking classes.
I can understand how that can be frustrating. I feel, though, that at this level there should definitely be some form of a speaking class and that we should be given the opportunity to express ourselves using complete and coherent sentences.
Rather than doing an extensive reading for an hour (as we did in prior classes), in the most recent class, each student only read one short paragraph and we had an actual discussion before and afterward. I think the teacher can and should always adapt to the student’s ability.
Free Speaking Classes are supposed to talking be about a current topic on the day the class takes place. This means we cannot have a “fixed” article that we are going to talk about, but we always need to talk about a new one and there is no way to know in advance what will be the current article on that day.
So we only define a webpage and then we will talk about “whatever article is displayed in this place”. this will (and should - it wouldnt be current otherwise and we dont want to talk about last years news) always be a different article. In the pdf we try to explain as clearly as possible where the article is and how to get the link. I think its quite easy once you have done it, but I am very open for suggestions on how to explain this even clearer.
Also, the article is only a starting point for a discussion (which can go any way from there). This is not a reading class and we should not spend a lot of time reading any parts of the article.
So it is ok of course to read the article in advance, however there is no need for it.
We tested all those websites and they worked without problems when we designed this two months ago. If any have a technical issue please let us know and we will of course change straight away.
Sorry for this being all a bit confusing. Very open for all suggestions, but the idea to always start with the newest and freshest article on a website that updates daily instead of some “canned news” from a textbook is very much at the heart of this.
We have done like 10 teacher trainings, recorded videos, wrote articles on how to teach these classes, but in case any teacher does not get that right yet, please let me know and we will do a personalized training for them again
update the Free Speaking PDFs to explain we’ll be discussing a DIFFERENT and a very current topic every class (somewhere next to the stale screenshots where it says “The article is shown here”)
add a link to Additional resources with a note that will look like “name_of_the_website (please click on the first/newest article)”
Personally, I quite enjoy the Free Speaking classes. Now that I’m done with HSK4+ these are the only classes I take (until HSK5 is available).
On a separate note, I would prefer if teachers actually used the Free Speaking Template (or started a new document from scratch) instead of typing all over the Free Speaking PDF that has no context of what we’re discussing (it’s fine for all the other classes though).
Additionally, instructors could also copy & paste the actual URLs of the day (links to the articles) into that template so we can review them later (as well as the important new vocabulary).
A slightly different topic: I haven’t booked any HSK4+ lessons so far, but I noticed that with the HSK4+ PDFs, I can’t copy any of the text into my favourite dictionary anymore. That would make preparing the classes more difficult for me (especially as even the new words don’t have any pinyin anymore - even when they are being introduced).
Copying works with the PDFs up to HSK4.
Try out if you can copy the English text, even something like 1… I can copy English even in HSK4+.
I had this problem before. I guess that it is a font problem. Which means Chinese is not recognized as text, and therefore is only a “picture”. But I have no idea if the problem is my laptop, or if the used font is really an unusual one.
Any other ideas? This is quite an important issue.
Thank you!