From Monday 24th to Thursday 27th July, almost 400 Year 9 students from fifteen different schools will take part in an intensive Mandarin residential at Nottingham University as part of the Mandarin Excellence Programme (MEP) Year 9 Intensive Learning. These students are from the first cohort of MEP schools, and have recently completed their third year of intensive Mandarin studies. They have spent the past three years studying four hours of Mandarin in school and four hours at home per week to practice and perfect their Mandarin ability.
With the Intensive Learning theme ‘Our Mandarin World,’ the in-depth and exciting four-day programme of lessons, lectures and activities has been developed by the MEP Team here at the IOE Confucius Institute, and will be supported by our UCL IOE Mandarin Chinese PGCE students and the University of Nottingham staff and students. The students’ main focus across the week will be to work together to plan and create an advertising campaign about their home town or area, ending with a five minute group pitch to a panel of judges, delivered entirely in Mandarin!
The students’ time at Nottingham will be spent not only working on their project, but will also be divided between Chinese lessons, lectures, and cultural enrichment activities, led by the Nottingham University Confucius Institute. In addition to building on and cementing their existing Mandarin knowledge, they will also be given the opportunity to expand their knowledge with some interesting areas of language they would not usually focus on in the classroom, such as Chinese slang and internet talk, writing a speech in Mandarin and the language of Chinese advertising.
Students will also receive guest lectures from Eve Baker of Beiwei 55, and Arnold Ma, CEO of Qumin which will demonstrate and discuss potential career paths they may wish to choose, and the whole residential will give them an exciting and unique insight into University life as they spending four days eating, sleeping and living at a real University campus.
