Job Discussion Forums

voodikon · Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 1363 Location: chengdu

as all my colleagues will be leaving to their hometowns over the weekend or early next week, i'd like to have some kind of spring-festival-oriented lesson that's kind of fun and not too intense so they can leave all happy and upbeat but still learn something. is anybody doing anything like this with their classes?

my students are adults, advanced level. we focus mostly on speaking, client-employee phone conversations, e-mail writing, etc.

Spiderman Too · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 2:55 am Post subject:

Ask your students to tell you about Spring Festival; what they will do, what they will eat. Ask them to tell you about the Lantern Festival; first full moon after the new year, which marks the return to 'normal' life.

Ask them to tell you about the food they eat for the main Spring Festival feast. Ask them why superstition dictates that they eat fish (apparently the Chinese word for fish has a similar sound to the Chinese word for money).

Ask the students about 'lucky money'. Ask them why the envelopes must be red. Ask the students why the color red is considered to be lucky, especially at new year - an evil demon use to visit communities and take lives each new year until someone discovered that it was scared off by the color red.

Lead the students into a general discussion about Chinese superstitions. Tell them about 'western' superstitions - black cats, spilled salt, broken mirrors, 13, knocking on wood, etc.

This lesson went well in each one of my classes (10 @ 30 students). The students were keen to tell me about Chinese superstitions and were fascinated by 'western' superstitions.