Welcome

This site is part of the Chinese Character Literacy Project which has been funded by the Five College Blended Learning for Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences and supported by the Five College Deans and a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This site serves as an online character learning platform which showcases the character videos made by students and instructors in the beginning Chinese courses (CHI110 and CHI111) at Smith College (and with the hope to collaborate with other institutions in the future).

The videos on this site include:

1. Outstanding student-produced character videos with learner’s perspectives and strategies to learn Chinese characters.

2. Instructor-produced character videos on challenging characters with etymology explanation, configuration analysis, and learning strategies.

The goals of the Chinese Character Literacy Project are as follows:

1. To help students in the beginner level Chinese courses to overcome the most difficult yet essential component of learning Chinese as a foreign language: Chinese characters;

2. To improve Chinese character literacy by having students create their own character videos to internalize their understanding of characters and document their learning process;

3. To allow instructors to easily evaluate students’ progress, identify common mistakes, and customize teaching strategies by making the learning process visible through the character videos;

4. To create a supportive and collaborative learning community by having students share character videos and discuss their learning process and progress with each other;

5. To develop this WordPress online platform to better support a blended learning and flipped classroom model in our Chinese program and to share this platform with Chinese learners at other institutions.