On January 29th, the "Chinese Bridge" online winter camp for Belarusian students, sponsored by the Center For Language Education and Cooperation of the Ministry of Education and organized by the Dalian University of Technology, officially ended. Over a period of 2 weeks, 80 students from the Confucius Classroom of Orsha No.16 Middle School in Belarus gathered in the online cloud, to share the feast of languages and culture.
This "Chinese Bridge" online winter camp is the first online short-term project organized by the School of International Education for the overseas joint construction of Confucius Institute. Based on the training theme of "Strengthening the Level of Spoken Chinese, Deeply Experiencing Chinese Culture", our school carefully set up Chinese course, one-to-one exchange course and Chinese cultural course for the students participating in the winter camp, in order to comprehensively improve their level of spoken Chinese and deepen their understanding on Chinese culture.
Chinese course and one-to-one exchange course were taught by teachers of Chinese to speakers of other languages with rich teaching experience in our school through real-time online broadcast on the online learning platform "Chinese Alliance". Chinese course aims to improve students’ practical application ability in Chinese. The teachers selected practical themes for the course, carefully designed the gaming links and interactive links, which fully mobilized the enthusiasm of students to learn Chinese. Students quickly transformed their knowledge learned in class into practical application, and their level in Chinese was greatly improved during the camp. One-to-one exchange course was the highlight of this online training project. This course is a practical exercise of the knowledge learned by students in Chinese course, and also a test of their learning situation in Chinese course. “I like the one-to-one exchange course best,” said Ilya from Class 2, “It's incredible for me to have the opportunity to meet face to face with Chinese teachers.”
In order to meet the diverse needs of the students, our school has hired 8 senior teachers of Chinese culture to record Chinese culture course. Chinese knot, Chinese painting, Ruan musical art, Chinese calligraphy, zither appreciation, Chinese tea art, Taichi Chuan and Chinese paper cutting classes were deeply loved by Belarusian students. According to the feedback of Belarusian teachers, the students practiced after watching the Chinese cultural course, following the method that teachers taught to knit knots, practice paper cuttings, write couplets and draw gourds in the melodious sound of zither, and some students even played Taichi Chuan in a decent way.
At the end of the camp, the students prepared a special surprise for the teachers. They made red paper lanterns with elements of Chinese Peking Opera in advance, handhold lanterns standing in two rows in front of the large screen on the day of the end of the camp, and sent words of thanks and blessing to the teachers, “Thank you for your hard work and patient guidance. We have gained a lot these days!” “Teacher, all of us love you, thank you very much” “We will study Chinese at Dalian University of Technology in the future!” The distance can not block the relationship between teachers and students, the teachers sitting in front of the live screen were deeply moved.
Belarusian students participating in the "Chinese Bridge" online winter camp were generally younger. The significance of holding this camp aims to fundamentally enhance the "hematopoietic" function of Chinese teaching in Belarus and reserve talents for the future development.
It is to take Chinese as the bridge, to build the relationship between China and Belarus. In the future, our school will take this “Chinese Bridge” winter camp as the starting point, to actively explore a new mode of online teaching, so as to make unremitting efforts to cultivate more ambassadors of cultural exchanges between China and Belarus.
