The Belt and Road Initiative has significantly boosted the demand for international Chinese language teachers, marking a “golden opportunity” for Chinese language education worldwide (Sun, 2021). Currently, there is widespread enthusiasm for learning Chinese, with over 50 million learners across 100 countries and more than 2,500 universities offering Chinese language courses globally. In 2015, Wen and colleagues developed the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) to address the “learning-using gap” in China’s foreign language education. This approach consists of three key stages: “Motivation-Enablement-Assessment.” Specifically, the Enablement stage bridges the gap between Motivation and Assessment as it provides targeted expansion exercises, such as mind mapping, to satisfy students’ “hunger” for knowledge from the Motivation stage while laying a solid foundation for the Assessment stage. Using the POA, this paper explores the application of mind-mapping techniques as the Enablement stage among 20 college students in two intermediate Chinese comprehensive courses at a U.S. institution. Through a two-semester, two-round action research study, this paper explores methods to address common issues in the intermediate Chinese instruction, where both teachers and learners emphasize understanding vocabulary and language points while overlooking the main content, inherent structure, and expression of the text. By utilizing mind maps, this study aims to guide learners in grasping the overall content of the text, enhancing their awareness of text structure and paragraph-level expression, and providing empirical evidence to improve the efficiency and quality of Chinese language teaching.

Authors:
Zijuan Xie, Yanshan University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Zijuan Xie, master student at Yanshan University

General Interests: Production-Oriented Approach (POA), the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)

Current Project: POA

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