Creating Videos for First-Year CSL Classes

Yike Li, Lecturer at Columbia University

Multimedia is highly effective for motivating students in the L2 classroom. However, there haven’t been such materials available to first-year Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) students at Princeton, due to the difficulties that arise from the limited listening proficiency of students at the beginning levels. Looking now to bring our teaching materials up to date with the addition of multimedia, I made thirty 1- to 3-minute videos for use as supplementary materials for FIRST STEP – An Elementary Reader for Modern Chinese (Chih-p’ing Chou, Jing Wang and Jun Lei 2014). This effort involved scriptwriting, producing, recording, and editing. The video formats vary, including interviews, dialogues, short skits, short films, etc. Drawing on the Pedagogy of Performing Another Culture (Walker 2010), the videos depict scenarios that students would not be able to personally encounter in the US, e.g, bargaining with a Chinese peddler, seeking love in a matchmaking corner in Beijing, and conversing with members of a Chinese university campus. In addition to demonstrating nuanced cultural interactions, students watching the videos can also pick up on various dialects, accents, and instances of polyphony.

I would like to express my special gratitude for my colleague Jing Wang who helped me modify the scripts and made a lot of suggestions for revising these videos. I would also like to thank Ding Wang-Bramlett, Jing Xie and Ying Ou for giving me suggestions before or after using these videos in classes. Above all, a big thank you to all actors, actresses and those who helped me finish this video project.

This video project is sponsored by the Center for Language Study and the Department of East Asian Studies of Princeton University.