Dear NFLRC 2017 ISI participants:

Thank you all for your wholehearted participation in the Day 1 Chinese learning experience, engaging in service learning to the benefit of Hawaii's Plantation Village. With minimal time available, you stepped up and made a product with real impact that will actually appear on the counter at the ticket desk. The potential is there for quite a few young visiting "Jiajias" to enjoy doing the yóuxì (activities/games) you created. Update September 19: The Activity Books have been printed and delivered to HPV! They will be offering them for sale.

The "Worksheet: Evaluation and Self-Assessment" document you filled out along the way provided you with a basis for reflection on your experience, and in the aggregate yielded a few interesting results. The sample is small and was gathered under uncontrolled conditions, so we should view any results with caution.

Results from the first part of the day (Entry Event including the Jiajia story, evaluating children’s activity books on the bus, HPV tour) were not highly differentiated. In other words, these various experiences seemed to hold varying levels of appeal for you as individuals (although the Jiajia story was rated highest). Design Time also received mixed ratings, and considering the large challenge you faced and the many facets of the Need to Knows, I am surprised that Design Time did not receive lower ratings! But something must have been working right, because through repeated iteration we came up with quite a high-quality product.

In terms of language learning, the only data we have are self-reported; we did not examine linguistic achievement among the eleven Chinese-learning participants. But broadly speaking, responses indicated some sense of achievement. Answers to the three queries on “can dos” following the experience fell slightly on the positive side — i.e., there were more ratings of “Can do with some help / starting to do without help” than there were “Not at all / very minimally.” For such a brief experience, this is remarkable and encouraging.

The language interview using the ”Survival Sheet" was delayed, so the first time you filled out the related section a lot of you put “N/A” in that section. But all 11 of the Chinese learners went back and re-rated this section later, so we do have the data. I should first state that from my point of view as an instructor, I did not regard the language of the interview as a “target construct” in any significant way — in other words, I had no expectation that language acquisition would take place based on the ”Survival Sheet" and the interview. I simply wanted to provide minimal scaffolding to get into, through, and out of the interview. It turns out that your survey data seem to support my strategy. Eleven learners returned ratings on the interview process. Contrasting their anticipated efficacy before doing the interview — their “readiness” — with their perceived “overall efficacy” during the interview, we see a rise from an average rating of 2.18 (on a scale of 1 to 4) to an average 2.82. From this we can see that people did better than they anticipated on the interview. In response to the query about “communication in the target language,” the mode was split between five who chose “We managed to stay in Chinese about half the time” and five who chose “We stayed in Chinese most of the time.” I would say that’s pretty good.

At the end of the day, looking back on skills acquired, the interpretive-mode skills fostered by the input phase stand out in my mind. In designing projects of your own, I would urge you to take note of this technique of basing the entry event on a comprehensible narrative that frames the driving question. The story of Jiajia seems to be a touchstone for the non Chinese-speaking participants -- a memorable learning event. The query on comprehensibility of the story yielded all positive ratings, with an average of 3.55 on a scale of 1 to 4. The story plainly served as an effective entry point to the Chinese language, with the potential to serve as a foundation for further acquisition, given the number of “hooks” in the story that would be easy to exploit later. For example, while there was no special focus devoted to syntax, I would wager that the phrase “Jiājia de māma” would serve as an effective template for participants in any subsequent exploration of syntactic structures involving “de.” From my viewpoint as a Chinese language educator, this result makes me happy because syntactically “de” contrasts with English, and is highly productive in Chinese, since it is the same structure that underlies all relative clauses in Chinese:

So this "chunk" of language, acquired early, becomes a foundation for future development. I know that a simple reminder of “Jiājia de māma” would help these learners at some future point when the question of relative clauses arose.

I look forward to seeing all your project designs in the Repository!

Stephen Tschudi