Practical Business Chinese is an online learning Assistant (CD-ROM) produced by Tell Center of Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Purdue University.
It is based on Wei Hong's textbook "Practical Business Chinese"(PBC) which is adopted at Purdue and other institution worldwide. It is to provide students with computer-assisted learning tool to be informed of general practices of doing business in /with China, developing cultural awareness, pre-/reviewing the course work, and working on homework assignments that may be otherwise challenging without the help of a computer. For business people, on the other hand, who are not able to enroll in a Business Chinese course, this learning assistant would help greatly in self-learning the materials in PBC. This instructional system takes full advantages of digital video and presents five different exercise formats all involving interactions with video clips. Through these exercises, the students will receive plenty of exposure to the target language and practice in aural comprehension, oral production, vocabulary and spelling. The system has been on the market with Spanish content materials. French and Chinese will be published in Summer 2001.
This software provides students an interesting environment to learn Chinese language and culture in the field of business. It is graphically rich and presents students with colorful pictures about China and business environment of China. The content is well organized, which helps students to learn effectively how to make communication in Chinese business context.
Through digital video technology, it allows the students to have self-pace study. In other words, students can control video viewing. For example, as soon as the students come to the first screen, they can select a movie from the Select a movie pull-down menu and view it with the video controls provided.
It provides interactive learning environment. Students can interact with video through five activities. The first one is warm-up activity. When one uses the software, he can find that there are four segments of the movie clip displayed on the screen. The second one is Comprehension activity, which presents a series of comprehension questions in multiple-choice format. The third one is Role-play for pronunciation practice and fluency building. In the role-play screen, one can click the play button and have the entire dialogue replayed with each line highlighted as it progresses. The fourth one is Cloze Dictation, which helps to enhance the mastery of vocabulary. The fifth one is Reconstruction that draws the learner's attention to the function of each utterance as well as the discourse structure of the dialogue.
Created by Ling Wang April 6, 2001
Source of information: Professor Wei Hong