“XUE HUA PIAO PIAO BEI FENG XIAO XIAO”^Brief introduction on how to apply Chinese songs in Chinese language teaching

Music is a universal language of human beings, and anyone can communicate their thoughts and express their emotions through music. In the process of international Chinese language teaching, Chinese songs are a useful tool to enhance students' interest in learning and activate the classroom atmosphere. Learning to sing Chinese songs can be very helpful to students' spelling and pronunciation. Some students cannot read new words, but they can sing the words correctly, which is the magic of music.

In the introduction of an advanced Chinese class, a student asked what "XUE HUA PIAO PIAO BEI FENG XIAO XIAO" means, and I gave a bilingual explanation without thinking: "The snow falls and the wind blows."

After class, I reviewed this class and found out that the line "XUE HUA PIAO PIAO BEI FENG XIAO XIAO" has already been popular on social media platforms for a long time, and it is an extremely popular Chinese lyric on the international version of Douyin (TikTok) platform. The Chinese song YI JIAN MEI ( One Trim of Plum Blossom) once topped the listening charts of Spotify, the world's most popular digital music platform.

In the process of teaching the Chinese song YI JIAN MEI in class, I sent the song video with Chinese lyrics, pinyin and English translation to students and asked them to pay attention to whether the song's phonetics was accurate and whether there were mistakes in the pinyin markings in the song video, so that they could find out the mistakes and correct them to ensure the classroom teaching went smoothly.

I then sent the students a video of the Internet cover along with the song.

Next, I began teaching the songs by the following steps.

First, I let students listen to the song and fill in the missing words. Students were provided with the full text of the lyrics, and then I deleted the words students have learned in the lyrics, including "Zhēnqíng (true love)", "Cǎoyuán (grassland)", "Yángguāng (sunshine)", as well as the learned sentences like "Xuěhuā piāo piāo, běi fēng xiāoxiāo, tiāndì yīpiàn cāngmáng (The snow falls and the wind blows; the land is vast and boundless.)". As they listened to the song, I asked students to fill in the missing words and sentences. This practises students' listening skills and reinforces their vocabulary and sentence patterns they have learned, and the completed lyrics also provide students with a convenient way to practice singing the songs after class.

Second, I asked students to choose the proper phrases by giving phrases with similar phonetics. I removed some of the words from the lyrics and provided homophonic options for students to choose. For example, the option "Méihuā (plum blossom)" is mixed with "Měihuā(beautiful flower)", "Méihuà (plum blossom painting)", "Měi huà (beautiful painting)", to test students' phonetic accuracy.

Third, I had students sort the lyrics. I broke up the order of the lyrics and label them A, B, C, D, etc. Students were required to restore the order of the lyrics while enjoying the song. In addition, I randomly disrupted the word order within a lyric and ask students to try to reorganize the sentence according to their understanding, and then let them listen to the song to check it, so as to train their ability on sentence ordering and context constructing.

Fourth, I helped students to improve reading comprehension by guiding them to summarize the general idea of the chapter and paragraph in the context of the lyrics.

Fifth, I also introduced cultural knowledge, like extending the knowledge of the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter) and the four famous flowers (plum blossom, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum).

Sixth, I made students memorize the lyrics by carrying out song dictation. I played the song sentence by sentence and dictated the sentences to make up for the monotony of simple dictation, so that students can train their listening skills in a relaxing atmosphere with lively music and relaxation.

Seventh, I let students imitate their own sentences according to the lyrics they had learned. The lyrics are generally well-structured and catchy and can be easily imitated by advanced learners and can be used to improve students' writing skills. It also gives students a sense of achievement through singing songs that they have composed themselves.

Eighth, I organised students to discuss the topics on each song's background knowledge and application scenarios.

There is no definite way to teach, and applying Chinese songs into international Chinese teaching is an interesting and effective experiment. For international Chinese language teachers, this method not only helps to create a relaxed and lively classroom atmosphere for Chinese language learning, but it also contributes to increasing students' vocabulary, consolidating grammar points and reviewing general knowledge of rhetoric. Furthermore, for students in advanced Chinese classes, it makes a big difference to quickly improving their Chinese language skills and enhancing their sense of identity in learning Chinese. This way improves their motivation and initiative, and enables them to better understand Chinese culture and customs.

About the Author: Yu Caihong is an international Chinese language teacher in Belarus.