We are delighted to be able to launch twelve new MEP Student Projects for use with your Key Stage 4 students. We hope these resources give your Year 10s or Year 11s some more interactive, meaningful challenges in Mandarin as they work towards GCSE. The aim is to help you boost their Mandarin knowledge while encouraging curiosity and global citizenship.
These projects are designed to be used as part of students’ four hours of weekly independent study time on the Mandarin Excellence Programme. However, they are free for anyone to use in their teaching and learning. You can set them as classwork, as part of your Year 10 or Year 11 scheme of work, as a project to consolidate a unit of learning, or however you choose.
Curriculum-relevant language skill practice with cultural content relating to global issues.
The twelve new projects have been carefully designed so that your students will be reading, hearing, and using lots of high-level GCSE and HSK 3 vocabulary while working towards a concrete end product. They were created by experienced UK classroom teachers Rebecca Lin, Alex Ferraby and Zhang Yi, based on concepts by the UCL IOE CI team.
The projects will also get students engaging with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals through Chinese – in particular goals 1, 3, 4, 11, 12, and 13 (that is, No Poverty, Good Health & Wellbeing, Quality Education, Sustainable Cities & Communities, Responsible Consumption & Production, and Climate Action).
The projects get students engaging with the UN’s “17 Goals” through Chinese (image from United Nations)
Like all other MEP Student Projects, these are designed to be as student-led as possible. For KS4, each new project supports your students in creating something at the end: a podcast in Mandarin, a Chinese-language debate, a poster campaign for your school, and so on. As a teacher, very little input should be necessary: your main task will be to keep students excited about what they are doing, and give them time to display their work.
We also suggest trying these projects out as part of a competition between schools, or as part of a cross-curricular global citizenship project if your school has this focus.
Each project is accompanied by Teacher Notes which tell you what students are asked to do, show you which relevant exam topics are “accidentally” covered by the project, and give you suggestions for how to conduct the project. Student Notes are also provided so students can work through the tasks independently.
Students build up vocabulary throughout each project, leading to a quality piece of work at the end.
To read about the previous MEP Student Projects created for Year 7, Year 8 and Year 9, click here.
To download and try out all of the student projects (for KS3 and KS4), click here.
We are excited to see how schools use these projects. Please try one or two this term and let us have your feedback! Write to mandarinexcellence@ucl.ac.uk with your comments and questions.
