Learning pod: Group I

Peer’s name: Peter Zhang, Donghan Li

We chose to review Group C’s Interactive Learning Resource. Here are our opinions:

Your topic is daily communication in Chinese, we think you’ve made a very clear site and it is well-organized. We can see everything in the first page and if we don’t really want to read the first page, we can also find specific what we want on the top right corner. And there is also a search box as well. These are all very good designs so that the learners can find what they want directly. And the content and explanations are very helpful for learners.

And the topic you chose is also friendly for beginners because it is just daily communication in Chinese. In your learning outcomes, we can find that it is mostly about ordering foods and simple sentence structures in Chinese. In your course introduction, you mentioned that the course targets learners with some or a little prior knowledge of Chinese. After reading the course outline, we think it should be okay for beginners to learn. In your materials, those are simple words such as hello, thank you, and so on. So it is a good course for everyone to learn. 

Perhaps you might consider adding some videos for the reading part in your course outline. We find that there’s only some pictures for the reading part, there’s pinyin for reading. But we think it is still a little bit hard for those who only have a little prior knowledge of Chinese to pronounce all of those words correctly. It is just hard to pronounce a Chinese word by only watching the pinyin, because those pinyin might have a specific tone. When students are practicing reading, it could be hard for them to pronounce those words completely correctly. So we think adding a video for them to practice would be very helpful. Or maybe we misunderstood what you said about the target learners group. Your target learners are those people who can read every word they see only by watching pinyin. This would solve the problem that I mentioned above as well. We feel sorry if we misunderstood what you said.

We also find that there are some words in the writing part but they are not in the reading part. Perhaps you might consider moving those words in the reading part as well. Because the reading part is before the writing part, it seems to us that it is confusing that you put unfamiliar vocabulary in the writing part and the students don’t really know how to read them.

Everything else is perfect.

link to Group C’s Interactive Learning Resources

https://sites.google.com/view/learningchinese2023/course-overview

We will post peer review for our group’s Interactive Learning Resources once we received one.