Visual pedagogy plays a crucial role in foreign language teaching and the majority of students are mainly visual learners, especially public-school students. As a result, the teacher-researcher adopted various visual materials in this research for students from an Australian Public school in the Year Five and Six class. Based on those visual materials, the teacher-researcher developed visual teaching strategies aimed to fully explore visual pedagogy that can bring substantial benefits to young learners. This thesis is composed of 6 chapters. In Chapter 1, the thesis introduces a general background of the study, and in Chapter 2, it examines the research literature on which this study is based. The Chapter 3 explains the method and describes who the participants are. The Chapter 4 provides the data from the use of chosen visual materials. Chapter 5 extends the data by examining a range of visual strategies. In the final chapter, the thesis discusses the implications of this research for the teaching of Mandarin language in Australian schools. In the course of the research, the teacher-researcher found that a significant amount of content can be presented through visual materials. Considering students' interest and curiosity, the teacher-researcher believes that the choice of visual materials should be student-centered. Additionally, a variety of visual materials based on strategies the teacher-researcher used can resulted in higher levels of students' engagement in classroom than what would have been achieved with visual materials that only presente words. For an example, students can be more easily distracted by watching a lenthy video, but are better engaged with short videos. Basically, students are interested in visualizing and guessing, however, the teacher-researcher found that the same strategy may not work equally well for both boys and girls. Cultural issues also have impacts on the implementation of visual teaching strategies. Therefore, students' age, interest, gender and cultural background should be considered when choosing visual materials and developing visual strategies.
Date of Award | 2018 |
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Original language | English |
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- Mandarin dialects
- study and teaching (primary)
- second language acquisition
- audio-visual aids
- Australia
Exploration of visual pedagogy to make Mandarin learnable : a teacher action research project
Jin, Y. (Author). 2018
Western Sydney University thesis: Doctoral thesis