Introduction to
Our Web Materials

This project has been initiated and led by Professor Der-lin Chao since 2001. Prof. Chao has more than three decades of experience teaching American students and directing language programs at American institutions. She is a firm believer of using technology to supplement classroom instruction to enhance learning outcomes for students. This project focuses on helping English speaking students overcome various learning difficulties posed by learning Chinese.

The web-based materials are for beginner, intermediate, and advanced level Chinese students. These materials have been tested by numerous Hunter students and have been adopted by the instructors at Hunter College who then integrated these materials into the curriculum of the Chinese program. The data from the language proficiency assessment tests have consistently indicated that students at Hunter College with no prior Chinese background can become fluent speakers and readers of Chinese within four years.

Professor Der-lin Chao, who is the head of the Chinese program, is the primary author of the content. She is also the major designer of the technology-enhanced pedagogy for teaching American students. The most important goal of this project for Prof. Chao was to identify the learning needs and instructional gaps that have long been overlooked in the field. Once these needs were identified, the next step was to think about how to best use technology in teaching and learning them. Because of the fact that these topics were new and there had been very little to no research information available, Prof. Chao not only conducted pioneering research on these linguistic phenomena, she also organized the findings into logical learning chunks. Therefore, the materials designed represent the result of her long-term research analysis. These findings were applied to the best practices for learning a second language to ensure that the materials are accurate and conducive to learning.

Each set of materials include instructional and exercise pages. The instructional pages integrate multimedia technology to introduce the main concept. The exercise pages contain a variety of practice activities specifically tailored to the subject. To ensure that students can increase their learning opportunities on a certain topic, she also designed self-learning and self-assessment tools.

Professor Weiyi Cheng is the instructional technologist of the project. With her Chinese language instruction experience and web design background, Prof. Cheng supervised a group of Hunter College web developer interns (Jimmy Serafin, Karina, Sunny Mo, Michelle Cheng, Kevin Li, and so on) to program the website content. Hunter College instructors Bo Hao, Bing Ying Hu, Ming Ying Li, along with Hongrong Chen all provided valuable feedback and tested the materials with students.

It is our hope that more students will benefit from using these well-designed and pedagogically sound multimedia materials to address their learning difficulties effectively, so that they can continue to develop their language skills in all modalities to the advanced level. It is also our hope that more teachers will adopt technology-enhanced materials to facilitate the teaching and learning of the Chinese language.

To learn more about how to integrate these web-based materials into curriculum and the theoretical concept behind the pedagogical design, please contact Prof. Der-lin Chao at
Dchao (at) hunter.cuny.edu