Description: In this video, Haohsiang Liao discusses his rationale for assessing students' performance on a daily basis. He also shares a digital tool for providing students with written feedback.
Instructor: Haohsiang Liao
HAOHSIANG LIAO: Whenever you have interaction with people, you leave impressions. You are evaluated. So that's a very basic, fundamental idea. We want to give evaluation to our students each performance. That means each class. And the second thing is we are convinced that, as long as students are persistent and consistent in their efforts to take this course, they can demonstrate very good skills in Chinese.
So because of those two reasons, we adopt a daily grading system here. So usually, after class, we provide feedback to each student's performance in class-- including language, including his cultural behavior-- so that students know what to improve for the next sessions. We usually do written feedback. So we use an online-- we have a website called Engrade. So besides entering grades, you can also leave comments to each student privately.
So each student, as long as they get access into their website to their account, they will read the comments from the instructor. So the comments-- it really depends on the student's performance. It can be as simple as, you know, pay attention to the following pronunciations. It can be a little bit more elaborated. For example, think about, how are you going to deal with compliments in Chinese?
For example, this is another example I always like to use. In American culture, when you receive a compliment, it's very natural for you to say thank you. For example, your Chinese is very good. You say, thank you. Your English is good. Thank you. However, being humble is the way when you receive a compliment in Chinese culture. You don't accept it by saying thank you. Sometimes you say things, for example, like, there's still a long way for me to go, so it's too far. Oh, I don't know where the compliments come from. [LAUGHS]
So yeah, the fundamental idea in Chinese culture about compliments is to remain humble. So if the student's performance in class is from his L1, we will encourage them and give them the feedback by thinking about, how do you deal with compliments in Chinese culture, according to a textbook where everything is based on the materials we cover in class? So students can know this is something that they can work on.
