On The Chinese Lecture Classroom Activity At Harvard University

The Collective approach based on the Audiolingual method has first been used in a Chinese class in 1942 in the Army Specialized Training Program at Harvard by Yuanren Zhao. Since then, it has been consistently used in the Chinese program at Harvard and some other universities in the US, and its effectiveness has been widely recognized. We collected data from 6 teachers lecture classes at Harvard, each lasting 2 hours, and we analyzed several classroom activities such as the amount of teacher and student talk, the different drill models, the teacher's questions and the error feedback, etc. We found that the Chinese classes that use this approach have the following characteristics: the teacher has a strict control of the class; the class is centered on the students'activities; the main focus of the class is drilling on the important language points; great attention is given to the accuracy of the forms and pronunciations. At the end we point out the insights that this approach gives us about teaching Chinese as a foreign language in China, and we also give some suggestions based upon this data.