A Study On The Impact Of Two Different Mandarin-Teaching Modes On Student Engagement

Observing and reflecting the impact of teaching on student engagement is one of the indispensable parts of teaching activities.Student disengagement is one of the signs that they are not going to succeed in academic achievement and show no interest in their teachers' teaching,it also indicates that the teaching methods or modes do not apply to a certain student or a group of students.Therefore,the importance of checking the effect of both teachers' teaching and students' learning through measuring student engagement is self-evident.In this study,the author took Year5&6 students from two primary schoolsTakapuna Primary School(hereinafter referred to as TPS)and Campbells Bay School(hereinafter referred to as CBS)on the north shore of Auckland,New Zealand as the objects,and they were asked to conduct the adapted survey,originally made by Fredricks and his colleagues.The collected data was subjected to an independent sample T test to verify the hypothesis.In addition,the author asked the help from the lead teachers of these two schools to observe a lesson,which was carried under the same theme,duration and teaching process,but different teaching modes.The two lead teachers used the adapted classroom observation checklist to record the performance of both the teachers and students in Mandarin class.The following are the main conclusions:(1)Led by the team-teaching mode,the students tended to have higher engagement in behavior,emotion and cognition;(2)Led by the team-teaching mode,the students were more emotionally engaged.They tended to like and be more interested in Mandarin lessons,and were satisfied with the way their teachers worked;(3)Led by the team-teaching mode,the students were not actually more cognitively engaged;(4)Led by the team-teaching mode,the probability of engaged behavior wasmuch higher than that of non-engaged behavior;students were focusing on their learning,actively participated in class discussion and were willing to ask help from Chinese students;(5)Regardless of either mode,the difficulty and appropriateness of the teaching content directly affected student engagement.