Teacher training: Research about MYP Chinese Teaching from the Perspective of DP

In recent years, the idea that “Who knows IB will have the world” has gradually become the consensus in the field of international education. As DP courses are characterized by “academic”, “elite” and “limited learning time”, students’ learning and guidelines during MYP become very important. So, how to effectively link MYP with DP courses has become the most important issue for a number of IB schools and teachers.

On September 13, 2016, Lv Kunzheng, a teacher from IB Center of Beijing Royal School tried to sum up his teaching experience. Lv conducted an in-school training on “Review of MYP Chinese teaching from the DP perspective” for the junior high Chinese teachers. This training is the first lecture of the Lv Lecture Series. The purpose is to establish a correct and complete MYP Chinese Language and Literature teaching overview.

Lecturer:

Lv Kunzheng, Chinese Taiwanese, got Master degree from PekingUniversity, has seven years IB teaching experience, commits to IBDP Chinese literature, MYP Chinese language and literature teaching.

From the perspective of DP, combining “Merchant of Venice”, “Qin Yuan Chun—Snow”, “Rain”, “Swallow”, “Daddy’s flowers fall”, Du Fu’s poetry and other middle school text, Lv elaborated that “MYP Chinese teachers’ teaching plan and process” should be consistent with the concept of DP literary analysis. Teachers need to do a good job in the transition and convergence from MYP Chinese to DP Chinese.

Lv pointed out that while teaching, teachers can refer to teaching reference, but should focus more on the demonstration of classic works analysis, so that students can experience and know the process and methods of text analysis. Therefore, teachers should have the basic scientific research ability rather than the repetition and recitation of the teaching reference. What’s more, whether every analysis and demonstration is effective or not, all depends on the teachers’ professional ability.

In the course of training, Lv emphasized the importance of “literary theory”, and indicated that “literary theory” was the “rational” guiding principle for text analysis. Literature of different genre (poem, prose, novel, drama) shows its unique writing techniques. Moreover, because of their creation time and regions, different writers may have his own style. IB Chinese teachers need to have a systematic and solid understanding of the literature history, thought history, stylistics, literature technique and other theoretical knowledge so as to skillfully guide students. In the actual teaching process, teachers need to help students to build the conceptual framework of analytical methods, guide students to ask questions about literary works and do comparative analysis of different literary works.

Suggestions:

During MYP process, we can analyze literary works from the following aspects:

Analyze characters and discuss about the world; understand the times and cultural background factors of the literary works and the authors;

Familiar with literary theory, clear about style knowledge;

Master the method and skill of literary expression.

Finally, in view of that IB curriculum changes with time, as the executor of IB education, we must keep learning and reflecting, meanwhile, read more papers and professional books, organize academic salons, and share teaching and reading experience regularly.

After the training, teachers generally believe that through this training they not only understand the structure and focus of DP Chinese literature teaching, but also have a clearer idea and plan on the MYP teaching framework. Some teachers think this training is very instructive. As IB Chinese teachers, we need to study more literary theory, understand literary trends, and pay attention to the writing background.