Making Chinese Literacy Achievable

One of the biggest challenges in teaching the Chinese language to English speakers is that we do not have a system that allows us to better understand and more accurately assess the development of our student’s literacy. The field of English language learning or even ESL has decades of research from multiple countries and multiple linguistic backgrounds about the development of English literacy. There are well established systems such as Fountas & Pinnell and Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) that helps instructors assess students reading level, accuracy, fluency and comprehension.

But for Chinese, we do not have these types of systems or research and data to support the way we work with our students.  In order to make Chinese literacy more achievable for our students and enable them to become proficient readers, we need a system that allows teachers to better understand and accurately assess the student’s development of literacy in Chinese.

Data Driven Process Ensures Success

Level Chinese curriculum leverages standard framework such as Common Core and ACTFL Can Do statements and provides twenty (20) levels of objectives and mastery-based assessment with detailed analytics.  Our system helps teachers accurately assess the literary competency of each student and provides data for teachers to strategize and modify instruction based on each student’s needs.  This along with access to properly leveled books enable teachers to differentiate instruction and promote students to be successful.

Watch video on how Level Chinese products help you plan your literacy instruction

Lesson Planning and Whole Class Instruction

Data Driven Instruction of Chinese literacy to 2nd language learners starts with good lesson planning.  Every school has its set curriculum.  Level Chinese provides resources so that teachers can additionally focus on literacy instruction while delivering the content specified by the school’s curriculum.  As you know, Chinese is a non-phonetic language.  Students need to recognize many characters before they can comprehend a simple text.  Even worse, when students learn one set of vocabulary in one book, they cannot easily read another book with different vocabulary.  That could make learning how to read in Chinese very frustrating for our students.

Our literacy instruction framework focus on transferable literacy skills.

  • Transferable skills are grammar points and reading strategies which students can apply even when they don’t know all the characters in a book.  Student can apply these skills and successfully navigate around unknown characters and achieve reading comprehension.
  • Transferable skills allow students to read different kinds of books independently without teachers having to always sit with them.

These transferable skills are called Objectives in the Level Chinese system.

  • 20 levels of Reading Foundation Objectives
  • 16 levels of Reading Information Text Objectives
  • Mini-Lessons

 

“Level Chinese’s literacy framework allows our teachers to map out appropriate objectives that can be used in both whole group and guided reading group teaching. The program structure really helps our teachers think deeper and plan their lessons using different books as resources. ” — Pearl You, Chinese Program Coordinator, Washington Yu Ying PCS

“Our students felt like record breaking athletes. As they mastered each objective, they were able to track their progress and push themselves further to master the next objective.”  — Principal, Chinese Immersion School

Differentiated Instruction

Differentiate instruction by dividing students into small groups based on reading levels.  Lesson planning for guided leveled reading is the same as whole class instruction BUT

  • You can now focus on objectives from the level suitable for the specific group of students instead of the whole class.
  • You can also use leveled books suitable for the group of students instead of one text for the whole class.  Students will also enjoy reading different variety of books at their reading level.
  • Students can independently read books from the level they already mastered OR students can work with teachers on books at their instructional level

Level Chinese defined Text Complexity and leveled published books so students can read at their respective levels.

  • Text Complexity Description for each of our twenty 20 levels for fiction and 16 levels for non-fiction leveraging standards such as Fountas and Pinnell text characteristics.
  • Over 800 books and passages from many different publishers across all genres (picture books, cultural stories, chapter books, biographies, informational text etc.) and formats (print, audio, online) are available in our collection.

Level Chinese is now a publisher.  Check out our Reach | Connect | Grow Non Fiction Leveled Book Series.

 

“Level  Chinese  provides  appropriately  leveled  objectives  and  books,  saving  me time … I love seeing my kids comprehend a new story, make connections,  gain confidence and enjoy reading on their own!” — Marty Chen, Chinese Teacher, Utah Dual Language Immersion

Watch video on how to plan lesson for differentiated instruction
Watch video on design of our worksheets

Students Apply Skills They Learned

Once instruction takes place, students need to practice applying their literacy skills on appropriately leveled books.  Level Chinese provides two types of worksheets.  Watch the short video to learn the details.  Both Simplified and Traditional versions are provided.

  • Basic Comprehension worksheets – One worksheet is provided for all books in the same level.  Open-ended questions targeting at students’ ability to apply the reading comprehension objectives of their respective level.
  • Detail Objective worksheets – Each worksheet is targeted at a specific leveled book.  It allows us to ask language/grammar questions in addition to reading comprehension

All questions are written in a similar style and use similar vocabulary as our assessments.

Mastery-based Assessments

We provide mastery-based online assessment as following :

  • Reading Foundation course – 3 types of assessments – grammar/language function, reading comprehension for fiction and fluency (running-record)
  • Reading Informational Text course – reading comprehension for non-fiction

Each questions used in assessment target specific leveled objective so that both teachers and students can clearly see the skills student has mastered and those that they need to spend more time on. The assessment results can objectively reflect students’ level of Chinese language usage, comprehension and fluency.

Assessments are online and automatically graded.  Both Simplified and Traditional versions are provided.

“Our students clearly understood the skills they needed to work and were inspired to master them to move to the next level.” — TeJung Chen, 3rd grade Chinese teacher

Watch this video on introduction to our assessments
Watch this video on introduction to our analytics

Analyze and Strategize

Our assessment system provides multiple ways for you to analyze assessment results.  With concrete data at hand, teachers and administrators can strategize how best to help students make progress.

Track and Analyze learning gap of each student

  • Track each student progress in your group/classroom
  • The range of levels in your group/classroom
  • View an individual student’s assessment result
  • Per Level analytics highlight which objectives need repeat instruction for the whole class, a small sub-set of the class and what intervention individual students may need.
  • Progress comparison of each student’s entire history in our assessment system – see how a student progress in levels throughout his/her many years at the school or school district

Analyze how groups of students are progressing with their learning at the end of each school year

  • Once your students accumulate data in our assessment system for a whole school year or more, this type of analytics helps you set learning targets per grade per year for the future based on your students’ historical data.

 

“I use the results of assessment not only to guide my instruction but also to set goals with students and parents.”

– Chiang Li-Chin, 3rd grade Chinese teacher

Loading...