Chinese (Version 8.4)

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Context statement

The place of the Chinese language and culture in Australia and the world
China's official language is Modern Standard Chinese, or Putonghua (the common or shared language) in Chinese.

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PDF documents

Resources and support materials for the Australian Curriculum: Languages - Chinese are available as PDF documents. 
Languages - Chinese: Sequence of content
Languages - Chinese: Sequence of Achievement - Background Language Learner Pathway - F-10 …

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Years 3 and 4

Years 3 and 4 Band Description

The nature of the learners

At this level children are developing awareness of their social world and memberships of various groups, including of the Chinese class. They benefit from varied, activity-based learning which builds on their interests and capabilities and makes connections with other areas of learning.

Chinese language learning and use

The systems of writing and speaking in Chinese are distinct. Because of the role of character learning and its impact on reading and writing, learners can accomplish a higher active use of spoken language than written language. As a result, engagement with Chinese language is primarily through speaking and listening. Learners practise using Chinese through participating in action-related talk, and completing tasks while relying on teacher modelling, prompts and repetition. Students respond non-verbally to spoken Chinese in the classroom, and their understanding of Chinese is dependent on context, and on teacher intonation, gestures and facial expressions. They repeat speech and sounds from frequent and consistent teacher modelling and produce texts using familiar words or phrases.

Contexts of interaction

Likely contexts of interaction focus on everyday educational experiences and students’ personal, family and social environments. These familiar contexts are represented in the classroom in structured and scaffolded situations.

Texts and resources

Key text types and contexts include short predictable texts, photo biographies, correspondence, and structured and scaffolded situations. Students engage with a variety of Chinese language texts, including short audiovisual texts, plays, fables, rhymes, songs and dance, extending their use and comprehension of Chinese language and culture. Students also produce simple oral and written texts. They are exposed to a wide range of Chinese voices and settings through the use of multimedia texts, simulations and performances.

Features of Chinese language use

Students discover the distinctive features of the spoken language and begin to use Pinyin and tone marks to practise syllables and tones they encounter in new words. They recognise that letters in Pinyin and English produce different sounds using different spelling conventions. Printed texts used in the classroom are mainly presented in Pinyin but may be glossed with characters. Students use Pinyin to write, knowing that characters represent the real form of writing in Chinese. They use a variety of communication modes, including oral communication in English and Chinese as well as mime and gesture.

Level of support

Chinese language use is scaffolded and prompted by the teacher, and teacher modelling of correct language use is the main source of oral and written language acquisition.

The role of English

English is used where it supports comprehension of and participation in Chinese interactions, and when discussing issues of comparison and contrast between languages and cultures.


Years 3 and 4 Content Descriptions

Socialising

Interact with teachers and peers in social and class activities, exchanging ideas and opinions, using correct tones

[Key concepts: friendship, play, relationships; Key processes: participating, noticing, recognising, listening] (ACLCHC017 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • giving personal information, facts and opinions in response to questions about people and aspects of daily life such as pets (我的狗很可爱), interests, routines and activities
  • expressing opinions and commenting on personal experience using familiar expressions (for example, 很棒。 太好了。我不喜欢…), and turn-taking (该你了) in class games
  • contributing to class activities by asking for (我可以…吗?) and giving permission (可以), apologising and excusing (对不起), raising hand and using phrases such as 老师,我不懂 to request assistance in learning activities
  • initiating conversations in familiar social contexts by greeting participants and introducing themselves (for example, 你好,我叫James,我八岁,我住在悉尼), displaying appropriate social manners to enhance communication
  • giving information in response to questions such as 你的弟弟几岁?, and responding to turn-taking signals such as 该你了 or pauses
  • following the teacher’s instructions to participate in learning activities, for example, 我们听 Sam 说一说
  • reporting group activity results to each other and the teacher, for example, Michael 喜欢打篮球,Sophie 喜欢游泳
Exchange simple correspondence with teachers and peers to contribute suggestions and arrange activities

[Key concepts: family, friendship, exchange; Key processes: participating, noticing, recognising, responding, listening] (ACLCHC018 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Capability
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • exchanging simple correspondence such as notes, postcards and text messages
  • using ICT to adapt or create drawings to support written communication in cards, posters and visual displays
  • adapting teacher-modelled language and using word lists to correspond with others, for example, creating cards to express good wishes and season’s greetings to friends and family members (生日快乐, 母亲节快乐)

Informing

Obtain and process information about significant people, places and events from spoken and visual sources, and convey this information using learnt phrases and key words

[Key concepts: significance, self, family, neighbourhood, environment; Key processes: participating, noticing, recognising, responding, listening] (ACLCHC019 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Capability
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • identifying commonly used terms for daily activities such as 你几点睡觉? to contribute in an online discussion with sister-school friends
  • describing people, places and things using actions and gestures, for example, to create a video clip to describe the school
  • planning and presenting short reports about holidays, special events and places using photos, illustrations, captions, diagrams
  • listening to short spoken texts containing some unfamiliar language, identifying key information, for example, name and phone number of speaker in a voicemail message, or the names, year level and age of Chinese children in a short interview
Locate factual information from sources and report this information to a known audience using learnt characters

[Key concepts: information, topic; Key processes: obtaining, processing, interpreting] (ACLCHC020 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Numeracy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • identifying key words in familiar text types (for example, a floor plan, map or calendar) by recognising textual features (for example, bigger font for the name of the capital city on a map) and using other visual clues
  • identifying and locating familiar characters or words in texts, and discussing the purpose and meaning of a text, for example, food packaging, a restaurant menu
  • creating posters using learnt characters to inform others, for example, about a special event or a favourite person

Creating

Respond to and create simple imaginative texts using voice, rhythm, and appropriate gesture and action

[Key concept: imagination; Key processes: feeling, participating, noticing, recognising, responding, listening] (ACLCHC021 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • performing plays in groups, using puppets and props, with allocated roles (such as 《十二生肖的故事》, 《饥饿的毛毛虫》), and using gestures and other movements to enhance the impact of performance, for example, using facial expressions to demonstrate emotions during a play
  • viewing performances such as a song and dance show for children and identifying features of language, for example, rhyming in 小燕子,穿花衣,年年春天来这里
  • creating own representations of familiar songs (小星星), poems and stories with a focus on varying voice, rhythm, gesture and action
  • reading excerpts of 童谣 and comparing Chinese-specific expression with English version, such as 小猫怎么叫,喵喵喵。小狗怎么叫,汪汪汪。小鸡怎么叫,叽叽叽。小鸭怎么叫,嘎嘎嘎。小羊怎么叫,咩咩咩
  • singing familiar songs from both cultures, such as 《小星星》,《说哈罗》,《猜拳歌》 or 《狼与小孩》, to memorise words and sounds and for enjoyment
  • expressing own feelings, likes and dislikes in response to Chinese stories, songs and poems, and asking for classmates’ feelings
Create short written imaginative texts using simple characters and short sentences

[Key concepts: characters, events, plot; Key processes: participating, noticing, recognising, responding, listening] (ACLCHC022 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • comparing the themes and content of nursery rhymes (童谣) (such as 小蜜蜂嗡嗡嗡飞到东飞到西小白兔白又白两只耳朵竖起来小燕子穿花衣年年春天来这里), for example, noting the frequent appearance of particular animals in 童谣 and recognising how this relates to traditional agricultural life
  • creating a storyboard to describe characters and key events in planning a story
  • creating plot diagrams using characters provided by teacher to annotate diagram
  • using pictographs such as 马, 田,山 to create cartoons to illustrate a story
  • designing play props and costumes appropriate to the context and setting of a story read or listened to in class, and identifying traditional Chinese clothes and accessories

Translating

Translate the meanings of important everyday words using contextual cues

[Key concepts: context, celebration; Key processes: participating, recognising, responding, listening] (ACLCHC023 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • explaining words and phrases to peers or the teacher, using gestures and actions to help convey meaning, such as facial expressions to express dislike or disappointment, agreement or enthusiasm
  • explaining meanings of colloquial phrases used on specific occasions (for example, 恭喜发财 to give New Year wishes), and discussing how such wishes are expressed in English
  • choosing words to translate information into Chinese, recognising different meanings for the same word, for example 哥哥 can be used to refer to an older male friend as well as older brother
Find English equivalents of common expressions in Chinese and vice versa

[Key concept: equivalence; Key processes: translating, explaining] (ACLCHC024 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • reading bilingual signs, comparing Chinese words to their English equivalent, and recognising how key characters in expressions contribute to the overall meaning, such as in 好好学习,天天向上
  • identifying meanings of Chinese words and phrases that do not translate directly (word for word), for example, 属 、 岁、马马虎虎

Reflecting

Reflect on how aspects of personal identity are expressed in Australian and Chinese contexts

[Key concepts: self, belonging; Key process: reflecting] (ACLCHC025 - Scootle )

  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • preparing a self-introduction and discussing the concept of ‘self’/, exploring questions such as ‘What makes me special in my family? In my class? In my school?’, for example, 我叫 Tina, 我是妹妹。我上三年级,我的老师是王老师
  • prioritising information when talking about self, for example, 我叫Kate before 我八岁
  • sharing information about one’s zodiac animal sign in Chinese and discussing in English the cultural significance of such information, for example, 我属龙

Systems of language

Recognise the tone-syllable nature of spoken language, and compare Chinese and English sounds (ACLCHU026 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • explaining the use of Pinyin as a learning tool to reflect the sound of Chinese spoken language, and recognising sounds associated with individual letters and syllables, differentiating, for example, qī , piě, rán and qù from English sounds for such letters and syllables
  • listening to and viewing simple conversational exchanges, recognising tone-syllables and experiencing the differences between Chinese and English intonation
  • recognising when and why some tones are not expressed in some contexts, for example, repetition of syllables in ‘Mama’, neutral tone on second syllable
  • listening to and reading out loud a nursery rhyme with strong Chinese prosodic features such as 《小老鼠,上灯台》
  • engaging in activities to raise tonal awareness, such as competing with classmates to read a tongue twister (妈妈骂马) and using hand gestures to help pronounce different tones
Reproduce key Chinese characters from familiar contexts using stroke types and sequences, and component forms and their arrangement (ACLCHU027 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • engaging with a range of basic characters and components and exploring their individual meanings, for example, 大 , 小,足,手
  • exploring the process of character construction, including counting the number of strokes, describing the shape of strokes, differentiating between similar strokes, and following general rules of stroke order
  • making connections between basic characters and related component forms (for example, radicals like and 扌;人 and ), and recognising the number and arrangement of components in a compound character, for example, that has three components and has two components, that (standing person) is on the left-hand side
  • exploring the concept of ‘word’ in Chinese and knowing that each character is a meaningful unit (morpheme) that is used to make up ‘words’ such as 白菜 (white + vegetable), 好朋友 (good + friend + friend), 男生 (male + student)
  • making connections between key morphemes in familiar words, for example, fruit group 水果、苹果 、果汁; vehicle group 汽车、火车、车子
Use nouns, adjectives and simple sentences to record observations (ACLCHU028 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • exploring basic sentence structure in Chinese, consisting of subject–verb–object, and learning to analyse sentences in both Chinese and English, for example, ‘What’s the subject in the sentence “My mum drives a car”? How about in the Chinese sentence 我看书? Do sentences work the same way in Chinese and English?’
  • recognising grammatical features and how their use differs in Chinese and English, for example, the lack of articles in Chinese; that adjectives can be used as verbs; limited use of the verb ‘to be’ ()
  • following patterns of word order and sentence structure and using negation when creating sentences to express own meanings, for example, replacing the subject pronoun in 我喜欢绿色 to create the sentence 我妈妈不喜欢绿色
Identify similarities and differences in the organisation of simple familiar texts (ACLCHU029 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • reading familiar text types in both Chinese and English (for example, menus, calendars, songs and TV cartoons), and explaining how the content and features of the text suit its purpose, for example, the menu has pictures of dishes to help the customer understand what kind of food it is
  • recognising Chinese texts (for example, Chinese film posters and newspapers), and discussing how the textual features are organised, including the headings, images and fonts, and the cultural significance of such texts
  • applying knowledge of text features to help locate key information, such as identifying details relating to name, age and nationality across diverse examples of social media profiles and print information forms
  • discussing a range of predictable texts with teachers and peers to perceive common components (radicals) in complex characters such as ‘woman’ () and ‘water’ ()

Language variation and change

Recognise that Chinese is spoken by communities in many countries (ACLCHU030 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia
  • investigating the use of Chinese in Australian communities and in countries and regions where diverse forms of Chinese are widely used, for example, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, USA
  • interviewing people in their community who speak Chinese, such as 妈妈的朋友, and finding out how the person learnt and used Chinese in their home country and in Australia, for example, ‘How did you learn to speak and write Chinese? Do you speak Chinese every day in Australia?’
  • recognising characters used in specific cultural events (for example, in various forms of New Year decoration, such as paper cut-outs, folk art, couplets), and identifying how the form might change, for example, asking why is sometimes presented upside dow
Identify the likely contexts and features of informal and formal conversations involving known participants of different ages, genders and social positions (ACLCHU031 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • comparing conversations between peers/friends with conversations between teachers/authorities, for example, 你/您; 坐吧!/请坐!
  • viewing and listening to the opening of conversations in a range of situations, and finding key words participants use, noticing how these chunks of language can change depending on the situatio
  • finding examples of the openings of informal and formal conversations in Chinese films, soap operas and children’s cartoons, and practising using these openings in conversation with teachers and friends

The role of language and culture

Identify how terms are used to indicate relationships and express aspects of culture that may be different from their own (ACLCHU032 - Scootle )
  • Literacy
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Personal and Social Capability
  • Intercultural Understanding
  • participating in exchanging good wishes in celebrations such as 龙年快乐, and comparing cultural practices of celebration from around the world
  • exploring the use of language and symbolic images during cultural events, and describing the cultural meaning represented, for example, looking at the use of the colour red during Chinese New Year and in good wishes of 红红火火 and asking why red is so widely used during celebrations in China; What is the cultural connotation of
  • discussing possible reasons why Chinese family names are placed before given names, and exploring the cultural meaning of various Chinese names, for example, 静 ,明, 勇
  • exploring the more complicated Chinese kinship relationships, and learning to address family members with a title rather than by their given names, for example, drawing a family tree and labelling each member with their Chinese title

Years 3 and 4 Achievement Standards

By the end of Year 4, students use spoken and written Chinese in simple personal interactions with familiar participants about self, family, people, places, routine, school life, and their own interests and preferences, for example, 你叫什么名字? 你上几年级? 你有狗吗? 你喜欢什么运动? They use appropriate pronunciation, tone, gesture and movement and some formulaic expressions. They use modelled questions to develop responses, for example, 你的哥哥几岁?, 他是谁?, 你住在哪里?, 这是什么? They respond to and create simple informative and imaginative texts for familiar audiences (for example, 狼与小孩) by selecting learnt words and characters. Sentences are short and follow the basic subject–verb–object structure with occasional use of adjective predicates, for example, 这是红色的苹果.. Learners use familiar words in Pinyin, or presented in characters in texts. Numbers are used in relation to age and family members, and to quantify objects with measure words such as 一个男生,两个姐姐,三只狗.

Students explain why Chinese is a globally important language. They understand that Pinyin provides access to the sounds of the spoken language. They identify features of the Chinese writing system, including the range of strokes and their sequences in character writing, and explain how component knowledge can assist in learning characters. They are aware that each character is a meaningful unit (morpheme) that is used to make up words. They recognise familiar word order in Chinese sentences. They notice similarities and differences between the patterns of the Chinese language and those of English and other familiar languages. They recognise that languages change with time and due to influences such as globalisation and technology. Students recognise that diversity of context and participants influence how meaning is communicated, and apply this knowledge to their own communication. They notice how cultural differences may affect understanding between people.


Years 3 and 4 Work Sample Portfolios