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1)A standards-based curriculum emphasizes on providing students with a clearer picture of students’ abilities and provides them with opportunities to demonstrate their learning in ways that align with real-life situations.
I also learned that the online student-centered course remains manageable and feasible. To do this, teacher-guided scaffolding (小讲，小练，小用，大用) is a fundamental component of student-centered instruction as it supports students in acquiring new skills, deepening their understanding, and developing the confidence to take ownership of their learning.  Furthermore, I also learned how to distinguish fake from true student-centered activities. The student-centered activity does need to be meaningful and communicative. Students are actively engaged in the learning process by giving opportunities to make choices, collaborate with peers, and reflect on their learning. Besides, they take ownership over their learning by having a voice in decision-making processes, such as selecting topics or projects, setting goals, and evaluating their progress.
2) What worked well for me was to set up consistent routines that I considered to be the most important thing in the online learning environment. They help students understand what to expect and enhance student's focus and engagement.  On the other hand, my biggest challenge of online teaching was lack of student-centered instruction, especially to teach big classes I have had (my biggest class is 29 students). They may face more distractions and make it more difficult to foster a sense of responsibility and sustained motivation for some students. 3)Fostering student-centered instruction in my classroom is what I strive to accomplish in my future teaching. To do so, I would like to explore how technology can enhance student-learning in my classroom by investigating new tools, apps, or online platforms that can facilitate collaboration, creativity and self-directed learning. Incorporate digital resources that provide opportunities for authentic and interactive experiences.

I also would like to explore further different instruction to meet the diverse needs of interests of my students. Lastly, I would like to continually seek ways to increase student voice and ownership in the classroom by encouraging them to take an active role in decision making processes other than waiting for me to feed them everything.

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I will choose Principle 2 and Principle 3 to reflect on my teaching experience in online teaching.

Principle 2: Facilitating a student-centered classroom

3 new concepts or good food for thoughts that have inspired me: 1) the present - practice - produce (3-P) sequence of teaching new grammatical structures, 2) the steps of 小讲-小练-小用-大用 cycle in lesson design， 3）mechanical and meaningful students activities are not true student-centered activities. True student-centered activities should be both meaningful and communicative.

In my online teaching experience, I have found that facilitating a student-centered classroom is crucial for fostering engagement and active participation.

What worked well:

1. Collaborative Learning: Encouraging collaboration among students in an online environment can be challenging, but it is worth the effort. I have found that utilizing breakout rooms allows students to interact with their peers, share ideas, and learn from each other. This approach promotes a sense of community and creates a supportive learning environment.

2. Inquiry-based Learning: Encouraging students to ask questions, explore topics independently, and construct their understanding is a powerful way to engage them in the learning process. Online platforms can provide access to a wide range of resources, such as videos, articles, and interactive simulations, allowing students to pursue their interests and deepen their understanding.

What didn’t work well:

1. Sufficient student-centered activities, but insufficient teacher-scaffolding. Sometimes, students might struggle and get confused without clear guidelines and structure.

2. Limited assessment tools. Without in-person monitoring, students might cheat on their reading and writing tasks. Speaking and listening assessments are good choices for an online teaching environment.

Principle 3: Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output

3 new concepts or good food for thoughts that have inspired me: 1) Language modification and simplification, 2) providing contextual clues with “here-and-now” strategy, 3) developing communicative competence through teacher-guided discussion and student-centered activities.

In an online teaching context, it is essential to create an immersive language environment to promote language acquisition. By using the target language effectively, I can provide comprehensible input and foster opportunities for students to produce language.

What worked well:

1. I am using a strategy similar to the “language modification and simplification”. For example, I ask students to explain the new vocabulary with previously learned words and structures, or have them match the new words with the Chinese meaning in Nearpod.

2. I use a lot of visual aids and realia in class. Utilizing visuals, real-life examples, and authentic materials in the online classroom helps students understand and connect with the target language. These visual aids facilitate comprehension and engagement, making the learning experience more enjoyable and effective.If the visual aids and realia are relevant to students' daily life, students would be highly motivated to learn and communicate with their peers about the specific topics.

What did not work well:

1. Total Physical Response (TPR). TPR is sometimes hard to use in an online classroom. Sometimes, students are reluctant to act on the verbal directions or it is hard to act on certain directions.

2. Technical Issues: Online teaching comes with technical challenges, such as connectivity issues, audio/video disruptions, or platform limitations. Sometimes, the comprehensive input might not work for some special-needs students. For example, audio and video might not work for a student with hearing problems and colorful photos do not work for a student with color blindness.

Identifying areas for future exploration and improvement:

Our district is promoting blended-learning or flexible learning mode. Exploring the possibilities of combining online and in-person instruction can provide a more comprehensive learning experience. Incorporating synchronous and asynchronous elements can offer flexibility, personalization, and a balanced approach to language learning.

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The chapter 3 offers some practical insights and effective principals on teaching world language in both classroom and online. I chose the following two principles.
1) Principle 2: Facilitating a student-centered classroom
A student-centered classroom encourages active learner participation, collaboration, and autonomy. It emphasizes the role of the teacher as a facilitator rather than a sole provider of knowledge. The time of students talk should be the same or more than the teacher talk.
The new concepts or good food for thoughts that have inspired you.
3P (Present, practice and produce): This sequence provide the clear structure to the daily lesson. I love the idea of 小讲-小练-小用-大用 which remind me of the time allocation in the teacher instruction and students center activity. In my lesson plan, I always plan 10 mins for mini instruction, 10 mins for interpersonal or teacher student discussion or modelling, and then 10 mins students produce the language for formative assessment. I plan very well but sometimes I can't control myself talking too much in one lesson.
Communicative activity: the three keys of a communicative-express, interpretive and negotiate. I  always try to design meaningful and communicative tasks for the student centered activity. I found well it improve students' motivation and participation. However, sometimes I can't get the activity completed smoothly and productively as I want. I will use the effective strategies in the book in the future lesson.
Teacher guided discussion: communicative competence need to be taken through teacher guided discussion and student center activities. I was inspired how the teacher design the communicative drill and lead the discussion to scaffold students to apply the language in the real communication.
I would like to continue exploring and implementing more student-centered activities and tasks to foster a collaborative and interactive learning environment. This could include incorporating more group work, peer feedback, and student-led discussions.
2)Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output
This principle highlights the importance of using the target language as the primary means of communication in the classroom. Providing comprehensible input helps learners understand new concepts, while encouraging productive output helps them practice and apply what they have learned.
Comprehensive Output: We always talk about comprehensive input and use 90% of the target language in the class. However, how about the assessment and the end goal of the lesson. That's making students generating the comprehensive and productive output. Teachers need to provide students the meaningful and authentic context so they can perform the tasks, produce the language and transfer the skills into the real life.
What works well in my class is the design and use the integrated performance assessment backward design my unit and improve students' proficiency. What did not work well is how to carry out the lesson effectively and how to scaffold the students for the comprehensive and productive output.
In terms of areas for future exploration and improvement, I would like to further enhance my ability to provide comprehensible input in the target language and scaffold students to the productive output. This could involve exploring additional visual aids, authentic materials, communicative drills, invitation students response, appropriate error correction, and culturally relevant resources to make the language learning experience more engaging and relevant for my students.

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1) The first good food for thoughts is the remark “emphasizing everything means emphasizing nothing” from one previous program participant. It is essential to plan lessons with clear desired goals in mind. When planning and designing lessons without textbooks, it is easy getting lost in searching materials and trying to include too much information. It is important to make decisions with desired outcomes in mind to guide students to focus on key language functions.

The second good food for thoughts is “being meaningful is fundamental but not sufficient. ... The three key elements of a communicative activity—express, interpret, and negotiate.” Reflecting on my own teaching, the course activities are meaningful but not always communicative. It requires time to design carefully to lead students negotiate meaning with others in the target language. I think it is also important to model and teach students how to negotiate meaning in the target language so that students can feel more confident to ask clarification questions.

Finally, “it is key to make the rule of thumb clear and transparent at the right start of class and conform to it all the time”. It is important to constantly monitor the use of the target language and give reminders to form students’ habits. Constant feedback on students’ use of the target language can set the expectation clearly and help building habits. This is challenging for me to have middle and high school students to chat with each other in the target language. They all know they can do it but sometimes they choose not to. I constantly guide them to rephrase and encourage them to use different circumlocution and communicative strategies. But I think for secondary students, setting clear expectations and giving constant feedback may help building habits of building confidence and habits in having casual chat with each other in the target language.

2)  I think scaffolding and modeling for outcomes help students a lot in class. They can see how we build the language knowledge step by step, and they know the final outcomes through modeling. One challenge I have is providing more interpretive practices and pre-class preparation. I agree reserving time for interpersonal activities, but I notice that my students also need more interpretive practices and pre-class preparation. However, I have to balance the amount of homework I can or am allowed to assign to students.

3) I would like to further explore and improve in designing thematic units from scratch with authentic and meaningful communicative activities. It is easy to recycle prior language knowledge with a textbook at hand, but with different thematic units from scratch, it requires careful design holistically. In addition, how to effectively use authentic materials and guide students to use in real situations is challenging but interesting to me.

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I have deepened my understanding of the three concepts of backward design, performance-based tasks, and scaffolding.

Backward design is the principle any language teacher should keep in mind. The teaching materials and performance-based tasks both serve the purpose of achieving the desired learning goals. The alignment between teaching goals, collecting evidence, planning learning experiences, and instruction is back and forth process of trial and adjusting.

Second, the concept of performance-based tasks.  Many students, after many years of learning, still find that they cannot interact and fulfill the basic tasks in the real world in a study abroad program. A couple of years ago, when my students visited China, they found that they could not even order the food in the Chinese restaurant even though they have been learning Chinese for 7-8 years. I think it may have something to do with how we teachers teach them this language in school.  Language learning is never a mechanical drill of vocabulary and structures from the textbook, but a transfer of knowledge into the authentic context. In teaching, I should design performance-based tasks that align with the learning goals. The purpose of designing different tasks is to collect evidence from the students when they transfer their learning and put their learning into actual use in an authentic context.

Third, the concept of scaffolding. Scaffolding helps students transfer their knowledge to the real world. Students need step-by-step guidance and scaffolding to perform the authentic task, and then achieve the learning goal. In my teaching, I feel that I need to work on the scaffolding.  Sometimes I jump too fast from small presentations to applications, missing the step of “we do”, due to lack of time.  To avoid this, I may need to further segment the teaching steps and rehearse in advance to simulate the classroom context.

In my class, the alignment is the most difficult part. Sometimes I cannot come up with the appropriate authentic performance-based tasks.  I need to reflect and make adjustments from time to time to make sure all the components of the whole process are in a straight line.

The alignment does not just happen in class, but also in the whole program. For the whole program, I think teachers should set curriculum articulation goals to decide on the target language domain for the 1st year, 2nd year, and 3rd year students.  Based on the standards, teachers can start to design the tasks and the curriculum. Then there will be a steady improvement in students' language proficiency over the years. Many language programs do not have standards-based curriculum articulation goals. The standards vary from teacher to teacher, from course to course.

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1） Principle 2 (Pages 43-49): Facilitating a student-centered classroom.
The success of student-centered instruction builds on teacher-guided scaffolding.When a new grammatical structure is taught, the procedure normally starts with teacher present, and continues with learners’ practice, the final step is assigning students to a student-centered communicative task to produce. This conforms with the three-state procedural learning: I do(instructor), we do (instructor and students), and you do (students).

Distinguish fake from true student-center activities. Students working in pairs or in groups doesn’t mean communication takes place.Mechanical, meaningful and communicative activities are all completed in pairs or groups, but a genuine student-centered activity cannot be mechanical. Being meaningful is fundamental but not sufficient. The author states it is only through a truly communicative activity that students express, interpret, and negotiate meaning. The three key elements of a communicative activity are express, interpret, and negotiate meaning.

Principle 3 (Pages 49-73): Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output.Teacher scaffolding for comprehensible and productive output.Teacher gives frequent invitations to students’ response. Teachers’ frequent invitations of learners’ responses are vital for comprehension checks.Six types of error correction strategies are useful in the classroom. Explicit correction,recast, clarification request,metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, and repetition.

2)
小讲-小练-小用-大用 works very well in my class. the cycle really helps to build the scaffolding to help student learn and use the language effectively.
Using the target language most of the time seems like a challenge in my lower level students' class. The students felt nervous and an emotion filter showed up.Maybe the sample rubric works and I will try it in the class.

3) In my class I do the three communicative drills.But they were in disorder, that can get best effective teaching and building students center classroom.. I will try to follow the order of mechanical-meaningful-communicative drills.  For example, I teach a new vocabulary chunk,let the students start to practice with a mechanical drill, then smoothly switch to meaning-based communication by asking students to talk about their real-life experience, and then involve more students for the communicative drill. The more communicative drills, the better.

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My reflections:

I am going to focus on two principles.

The first one is facilitating a student-centered classroom. The second one is using the target language to provide comprehensible input and general productive output. The reason I chose these two is because I can reflect the most from these two. I have been trying to create a student centered classroom and trying to use target language when I am in my language class.

1. The first new concept that has inspired me is that student-centered activities do not dominate all class time in each class. Sometimes teachers would use the whole class time for students to do their assignments. This is not the usual student-centered classroom. A real student-centered classroom conforms with the three-stage procedural learning: I do, we do and you do. This gave me better instructional ideas when I teach. Teachers need to provide clearer ideas and better instructions before students create their own dialogues or other assignments. Another way to explain this concept is “小讲，小练，小用，大用”. The students can only have more and better meaningful output after they’ve been fully trained and prepared by their instructors. The second new concept that has inspired me is that pre-class preparation results in more satisfactory learning than no pre-class preparation. The students can be more involved and more prepared in class after pre-class preparation. Teachers can spend more time on class activities and collaboration between peers than doing simple language input. What I also like about this concept is that teachers don’t need to use too much time to check students’ pre-class preparation, we just need to post several sentences on Padlet or write short essays on Google forms. The third new concept that has inspired me was the “here and now” strategy. This is the first time I heard this new concept. This concept is very practical in class. Teachers can use this strategy in any theme and any grammar pattern. Based on what we are going to learn and what information we need, teachers can ask a string of questions and invite students to answer. This strategy is not just beneficial for students to learn about a new grammar, it can also help students know more about each other’s background which can help students communicate with their peers and have better connections.

2. When I was reading the part about “Distinguish fake from true student-centered activities”, I realized that I made some mistakes before in my class. I used to think that as long as students were doing things on their own or sitting in a group working together, then that was a student-centered classroom. However, in the book, it mentioned that it is one of the fake student-centered classrooms. Sometimes in my class, I would ask my students to sit together with their peers to do their group projects. But the students were only physically sitting together, they were not communicating in target language or communicating in meaningful sentences or phrases we learned. Another activity I always do in my class also didn’t work as I planned, which was to ask my students to remember the dialogue. I found it helpful when I was learning a second language so I used it in my Chinese classes. Unfortunately, my students found the activity boring and were not motivated. The students’ thoughts and what they wanted to say were being limited to the text in our books. So what I found working was to only provide speaking or writing prompts for students. The students can decide what they want to say which provides them with enough freedom to express themselves.

3. One of the ideas that I am thinking about is what kind of activity can we create to help the students prepare the class more efficiently. We all know that it is beneficial for our students to do some pre-class preparation. However, the truth is that our students are very busy with their other school work and school activities already. How many of them can really do their pre-class preparation? If only a small portion of students do the pre-class preparation then for the full effect of the class, we still need to learn the concept again so everyone is on the same page. That’s why it’s important that teachers have a better pre-class preparation system.

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Principle 2 (Pages 43-49): Facilitating a student-centered classroom:

1.Distinguish fake from true student-centered activities. The student-centered activities related to what students really do in the class rather than working in pairs or in groups. The book indicates the differences of the three activities: student-centered mechanical, student-centered meaningful ,student-centered communicative. In my class, I usually don’t have too many mechanical drills, but we sometimes have meaningful activities. Meaningful activities look like students are having a conversation, but there is a meaning-negotiation process missing. The teacher needs to make sure to provide students with enough scaffolding, so students can involve expressing, interpreting, and negotiating in the communicative activity.

Principle 3 (Pages 49-73): Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output

2. Strategies for making language comprehensible: Language modification and simplification. If the students don’t comprehend the language/expressions, they cannot input and output. This section gives me an idea that the teacher can provide an explanation in simple Chinese words when students learn or meet new formal expressions.

3. Teacher scaffolding for comprehensible and productive output. The book explains four strategies to help teachers to understand how to scaffold. I like every strategy, especially strategy 4: effective elicitation techniques. In many textbooks and workbooks, there are many grammar drills without meaningful and communicative context. However, the teacher can lead students to talk about their real-life experience to approach and reinforce target structures/functions. The conversation seemed random, but it required the teacher to plan before class and adjust in class. I will continue to know more about how to teach grammar effectively and meaningfully in the future and modify the strategies of learning grammar.

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Principle 2 (Pages 43-49): Facilitating a student-centered classroom

1) Share at least THREE new concepts or good food for thoughts that have inspired you.

1. P43 The success of student-centered instruction builds on teacher-guided scaffolding

2. P46 Preparation and clear scoring guidelines lead to better language performance

3. P47 It is impossible to create a successful student-centered class with the teacher’s effort alone. Effort is mutually beneficial, and students’ collaboration is crucial.

2) Tell us what worked well and what did not work well in your class.

1. What works well: Provide opportunities for students to actively participate in the classroom. Use various activities like pair work, group discussions, role plays, and presentations to encourage students to use Chinese actively and interact with their peers.

2. What did not work well: It's crucial for teachers to provide guidance and support throughout the learning process, especially for beginners or students who may need additional assistance.

3) Identify areas for future exploration and improvement.

I need to explore and improve Task-based learning, which allows students to apply their Chinese language skills to real-world, meaningful projects. I want to explore how Task-based learning can foster critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and language proficiency development in Mandarin Chinese.

Principle 3 (Pages 49-73): Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output

1) Share at least THREE new concepts or good food for thoughts that have inspired you.

1. P50 All learner production should be meaning-based or communicative.

2. P50 We should watch out for what we expect of learners.

3. P58 Meaningful drills normally have contextual clues, such as a certain action or movement done by the instructor or students on the right spot.

2) Tell us what worked well and what did not work well in your class.

1. What works well: P52 Total physical response. Use gestures, facial expressions, and body language to support verbal communication. These non-verbal cues can help students understand meaning and context,

2. What did not work well: P56 Mechanical Drills: Such types of drill are not meaning-based or communicative-oriented.

3) Identify areas for future exploration and improvement.

P60 I need to explore and improve, provide feedback and corrective guidance. Also, offer constructive feedback to students to help them refine their Mandarin output. Focus on accuracy, fluency, and appropriateness of language use.

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Share at least THREE new concepts or thought-provoking ideas that have inspired you.

Principle 2: Facilitating a student-centered classroom.

What really resonates with me is when this principle mentions that "some may think that communication takes place whenever students work in pairs or groups. However, communicative activities are not defined by physical presence or the layout of seats and desks in class. Instead, they are defined by what students actually do. Pair or group work does not necessarily guarantee effective communication; it can be mechanical or lacking in meaning." When I reflect on my own teaching, I realize that while I design numerous pair or group work activities, not all of them yield satisfying outcomes. One of the main reasons for this could be that the pair work or group work is not truly communicative. For example, when I ask students to role-play a dialogue from the textbook, the activity does not involve their own experiences or an exchange of thoughts. Despite being called "role play," it does not hold much meaning for the students.

Principle 3: Using the target language to provide comprehensible input and generate productive output.

The sentence that inspires me in this principle is "a productive language class is high-energy, featuring quick turnarounds and constant recycling of the question-and-answer process." Additionally, it advises against asking questions like "明白了吗？知道了吗？" to check learners' understanding. On a few occasions when I asked such questions, most of the students remained silent, which cooled down the class atmosphere.

Reflecting on what worked well and what did not work well in your class, Identify areas for future exploration and improvement.

Compared to two years ago when I first joined the Startalk program, I have made improvements in eliciting frequent and high-quality student output. Previously, I focused primarily on providing comprehensive input, neglecting students' productive output. Over the past two years, I have emphasized students' output and consistently encouraged them to produce sentential-level response using conjunction words. I have witnessed significant improvement among my students. However, I need to work on enhancing my error correction skills as I tend to rely mostly on recasting, despite the availability of many other effective error correction techniques.

In the future, I would like to further explore and improve the following areas:

Incorporating more authentic and meaningful communicative activities into pair and group work to enhance students' engagement and language skills.

Experimenting with different error correction techniques, such as explicit correction, elicitation, clarification and etc.

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A: It is always good to be back to school or training programs after years of teaching. After reading chapter 3, it not only refreshes my knowledges but also gain some new concepts and skills. Three concepts I took away from chapter 3 are: 1) I have learned what is called scaffolding for years but still new to 小讲--》小练--》小用--》大用. After the pre-Startalk presentation and seeing how the teachers use it in class and create a whole lesson plan, it stuck in my mind and feels it is a breakthrough for my future teaching.  2) Using Here-and-Now, or On the Right Spot Relevancy to make input comprehensible. Based on the sentence structure need to be adapted, the teacher use question and answer guidance to invite students participate in the speaking activities and eventually leading to the sentence structure. Students smoothly transfer to the form needs to be learned without any abruptness. 3) Identifying the true practice from fake practice. The reading material provides a detailed explanation of what is mechanical activity, meaningful activity, and communicative activity. This helps me identify the level of activities clearly and provides me guidance on how to design student centered activities more practically and effectively.

B: Beyond my taking away from part A, there are some areas that I am eager to explore and want to improve in my class in the future. First thing I want to explore is to be flexible and free for students to choose the types of assignment or assessment. If it’s possible, I wish our on site training could cover some examples. My questions or concerns for this exploration is how to provide an equity assessment for students? How to make students think this is fair to them? Second thing I am going to improve in my teaching is to provide students to assess their peers’ learning and self assess learning. Although these are not new to me, but to provide an effective way to do so still needs more input and guidance if we could also have this topic covered in our training.

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First, implementing four essential reminders can effectively establish student-centered classrooms as a guideline for designing daily lessons. Employing the "I do, we do, you do" approach as a three-stage procedural learning model also offers a clear structure for delivering tasks.

Secondly, it is vital for teachers to offer scaffolding in order to foster productive output from students. This can be accomplished by initially engaging in mechanical drills, then advancing to meaningful drills, and ultimately designing communicative drills that are appropriate for students' language proficiency levels.

Thirdly, the utilization of effective elicitation techniques build a thorough comprehension of structure, meaning, and function for learners. Prior to the class, it is essential to analyze the target language elements and assess the students' language proficiency level. Additionally, incorporating recirculation and reinforcement of the target structure play a significant role in facilitating the internalization process for students.

Furthermore, I provide explicit directions by giving comprehensible input in the target language. I use attention-grabbing techniques and create activities that prioritize student engagement.

Additionally, I will dedicate more effort to incorporating authentic resources that connect learners with real-life situations. I will engage in practicing effective elicitation techniques to enhance students' comprehension of language functions.