This course takes students step by step through the experience of designing and implementing their own individualized language learning program. The emphasis is on Mandarin as the target language but students can choose other possibilities in consultation with the instructor. The learning experiences in this course take advantage of the surrounding local language environment to elicit the language expressions and patterns that students need and to master them by putting them to use in communication outside the classroom. The course is designed on a ‘learning by doing’ philosophy using the following reusable learning cycle under the coaching of the instructor:

- get what you need: eliciting the language expressions needed for specific purposes
- learn what you get: practicing these expressions to prepare for field experiences using them
- use what you learn: field experiences engaging in interactions with speakers of the language
- evaluate what you use: debriefing the field experiences to find the positive aspects worth repeating and the negative aspects to revise or avoid in future cycles

Each student will run through a full cycle once a week, each subsequent week leading to richer and more complex uses of the language. Tere will be a division of in-class preparation together under the coaching of the course instructor, out-of-class field experiences putting the language to use for communication, and then back in-class evaluation and debriefing of these experiences and planning for the next iteration of the cycle.

This course takes students step by step through the experience of designing and implementing their own individualized language learning program. The emphasis is on Mandarin as the target language but students can choose other possibilities in consultation with the instructor. The learning experiences in this course take advantage of the surrounding local language environment to elicit the language expressions and patterns that students need and to master them by putting them to use in communication outside the classroom.

- get what you need: eliciting the language expressions needed for specific purposes
- learn what you get: practicing these expressions to prepare for field experiences using them
- use what you learn: field experiences engaging in interactions with speakers of the language
- evaluate what you use: debriefing the field experiences to find the positive aspects worth repeating and the negative aspects to revise or avoid in future cycles

Each student will run through a full cycle once a week, each subsequent week leading to richer and more complex uses of the language. Tere will be a division of in-class preparation together under the coaching of the course instructor, out-of-class field experiences putting the language to use for communication, and then back in-class evaluation and debriefing of these experiences and planning for the next iteration of the cycle.

Brewster, Thomas Language Acquisition Made Practical, Lingua House Publisher

Brewster, Thomas Language Acquisition Made Practical, Lingua House Publisher