Class: Chinese C
Grade: 8th
Teacher: Runze Yang
Middle School students in Runze Yang’s Chinese C presented to Upper School students in Shanshan Xu’s Chinese class about the four major cuisines in China. They talked about the origin of the food, its flavor, a representative dish, and cooking methods. These included:
- Chuan Cuisine, which originated from Sichuan Province. The flavor is spicy, and the representative dish is hot pot.
- Yue Cuisine, which originated from Guangdong Province. The flavor is umami, and the representative dish is Dim sum.
- Lu Cuisine, which originated from Shandong Province. The flavor is salty, and the representative dish is Peking duck.
- Huaiyang Cuisine, which originated from Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province. The flavor is sweet, and the representative dish is soup bun.
Through this project, students practiced their Chinese language speaking skills as well as their public speaking skills. In addition, they also researched the reason why people in each region eat the cuisine they do, from a historical and geographical perspective.
This project is a really good combination of culture and language. It helps raise students’ awareness that they can be double-culture ambassadors: to the community they grow up in and the Chinese community. In addition, it was so cool to have our MS and US Chinese program overlap and so brave of our MS students to show off their new knowledge this way! — Runze Yang, MS Chinese Teacher
More about language in the Middle School
In order for students to acquire a new language, students need to hear, read, and understand it a lot. To achieve this, we maximize students’ exposure to Chinese, French, or Spanish through comprehensible language, including oral, written, and visual storytelling. We focus on the instruction and use of the high-frequency vocabulary, words that are the most commonly used in the language which can be used across many different situations.