Wednesday, May 27, 2009

GAT-a Teaching Module of Restructuring Basic Mandarin Sentences to UiTM Malay Students

Teaching elementary Mandarin to non-native speakers in UiTM is a demanding job. This is because the students have no basics in Mandarin and lecturers have a fairly short span of time to complete the syllabus in one semester. Besides, Malay and English are the two major mediums of instruction used in classrooms and students like to communicate using their own mother tongue. Therefore, the students’ exposure to Mandarin speaking environment is extremely limited. Because of the problems faced by the students in learning Mandarin, this paper proposes the Grouping, Arranging, Touching Up (GAT) module incorporating ‘Word Sequence’ Diagram (WSD) in the form of graphic impression that specifically caters for teaching non-native speakers how to restructure basic Mandarin sentences. Based on the theories proposed by Liu, Shen, and Zhang, it is apparent that WSD is very supportive in teaching students how to restructure basic Mandarin sentences correctly. This is because students only need to remember the five icons in WSD without absorbing the complicated grammatical rules to restructure the sentences.

At the end, students can visualise the logical flow of sentence patterns in Mandarin and will be more autonomous and confident in learning Mandarin as a foreign language.

Citation (APA 6th ed.):
Hoe, F. T., & Mah, B. Y. (2009). GAT-a teaching module of restructuring basic Mandarin sentences to UiTM Malay students. The International Conference on Languages 2009 Proceedings (pp. 341-349). Penang, Malaysia: Universiti Teknologi MARA Penang.

Click HERE to access the 1st page of the full text.