Effectiveness of ‘Pocket Mandarin’ for Online Learning among Mandarin as a Foreign Language Basic Learners

Abstract

In the face of difficulties of teaching and learning due to the impact of Covid-19, online lessons have become vital. This has also affected the teaching of Mandarin as a foreign language at universities. Since Mandarin is considered as a difficult language to learn especially to non-native learners, teaching online has posted an even greater challenge to Mandarin language instructors. This study thus examines the use of a combination of platforms and applications online, customised to create an online learning system called ‘Pocket Mandarin’ to facilitate online Mandarin learning at the beginner level. The purpose is primarily to enable learning to take place in a fun and interactive manner by means of online flashcards, pronunciation, games and quizzes placed in an LMS platform called Padlet. To better understand how ‘Pocket Mandarin’ can effectively facilitate online teaching and learning among EFL basic learners at the tertiary level, a survey method was applied and it consisted of 5 parts which are students’ motivation, students’ attitude, cognitive development, design and interface as well as expectations. The results show that ‘Pocket Mandarin’ was positively accepted by the students who found the lessons motivating, upbuilding, cognitively applicable, with exceptional design and interface and was better than their initial expectations. Thus, there is great potential for the ‘Pocket Mandarin’ to be widely used at a greater scale.