Rap music in Chinese learning
Adam Moorman from Fortismere School in London has created some excellent teaching materials based on rap music, which can be found below. Proposed changes to the Mandarin Chinese GCSE means a stronger emphasis is being placed on speaking and listening, as referred to here. In light of these changes, we have been encouraging teachers to come up with innovative ways to engage students in speaking and listening activities.
Adam says of his materials, “the idea actually came from Ding Jia’s session at the UCL IOE Annual Chinese Teaching Conference in 2015, I just decided to adapt it to suit my KS5 students. The idea is for them to listen to the rap, decide which of our speaking questions it answers, and then grade it using the marking criteria. After that, they choose a question to answer and prepare their own raps. It got a great reaction in class, and the students are now working on their own raps, which we will hear next Wednesday. The basic rationale is simply that rapping is very memorable, and also encourages students to be flexible and creative with vocabulary. It should be a novel, and hopefully successful, way of preparing for speaking exams.”
