Developing content learning in Chinese: The Victorian experience.

Prescott, Claudia ; Zhang, Yin

ABSTRACT

The number of primary students learning Chinese in Victoria has increased rapidly in the past two years in response to the state government's mandating of language study in the primary years. In all sectors, some of these new programs have opted to teach their language in intensive programs using an immersion style and offer content selected from regular school subject matter. To cater to graduates of these programs, a secondary bilingual Chinese program was also established. While these are not always formally content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programs, the teachers in these schools have been able to draw on CLIL literature and experience in other languages, including English as an additional language, to develop content-based Chinese. The particular learning challenges of Chinese, however, have required most borrowed practices to undergo systematic adaptation and have also necessitated considerable further innovation. This article introduces these programs and offers some of the work they have done as a contribution to the wider field of content-based language learning. While embryonic still, they show that well prepared and well taught second language Chinese CLIL programs could match student development in other second languages.

KEY WORDS

intensive Chinese language, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), school Chinese programs design, content-based Chinese, Chinese language challenges

Introduction

Victoria has long been Australia's 'languages state', and despite numbers continuing to drop across the country in recent years, it still has close to 50% more students taking a language at Year 12 than the national average. Victoria is also home to nearly half of the country's school learners of Chinese. These numbers got a considerable boost in 2013 when the then-Liberal state government mandated the learning of a second language in primary schools. This move continued to be supported by the subsequent Labor government, who adopted a slightly modified Australian Curriculum for Languages as the new Victorian Curriculum and stipulated that a language program should provide a minimum of 150 minutes of study a week. The result has been an increase of 20000 students in primary Chinese in the last two years (Orton, 2016).

Many of these new programs provide considerably more time on Chinese each week than has been typical in primary programs and a number use an immersion approach in which little or no English is spoken. Others have implemented a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach, in which a regular curriculum subject, such as science, is taught in Chinese. All these more intensive programs are particularly beneficial in the teaching of Chinese, where the burden on memory of a lexicon with no cognates and a separate character for every syllable can only be overcome by frequency of encounter. More intensive programs are not for the fainthearted, however, as little is available in the way of curriculum and resources, there is nothing to advise on standards and outcome expectations, and teachers have seldom been prepared for the style of teaching required.

This article describes new Chinese programs and shows that while they have been able to draw on common experience in the field of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), they have also had to develop a high degree of innovation to engage with the specific issues of Chinese. The article begins by briefly examining the development of content-based language learning and locates current Chinese programs within the current definitions of a CLIL approach. The second part of the article elaborates on the issues raised in this discussion through a case study of work in a secondary Chinese CLIL program. While the focus on Chinese should be of interest to teachers of Chinese, the discussion of issues in intensive language teaching also has much that will be of value to the broader field of second language learning in Australia.

Content and language integrated learning

Many new primary language programs are adopting a version of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) pedagogies and methods. These have been explored in different contexts and languages in Europe over the last 20 years and in Canada for more than 50 years, resulting in the creation of a substantial knowledge base. However, as Cross (2014, p. 4) writes: With the growing expansion of CLIL into contexts beyond and for which it was originally developed comes uncertainties about how the approach might be most successfully 'exported' into new education settings and jurisdictions.

The solution, Cross claims, is to realise that CLIL is a flexible pedagogical approach, 'applicable to a range of varied educational settings and conditions' (p 6).

Nomenclature in the field of CLIL is not common from one country to another, although language educators have generally adopted North American usage when discussing it internationally. Inside Australia, however, terms like bilingual and immersion can have local rather than international meanings, with differences in the nature of the program, and especially in their language-to-language ratio. For example, Australia's longest-standing intensive Chinese program at Richmond West Primary School, where students learn content through the medium of Chinese for 35% of their school time, calls itself a bilingual program, as it is also called by the Victorian Department of Education and Training--although the basis for this is not the American or international meaning of the term. Furthermore, even internationally, immersion is not a fixed term. In Australia 'immersion' means an approach to teaching in the second language, and it most often just means 'No English'. In these local terms, most intensive Chinese primary programs are 'immersion' and some are also 'bilingual'.

Marsh (2002) explains the European model of CLIL as being any activity in which foreign language and subject-matter teaching and learning share a joint role. All of the Chinese program types discussed here fit this definition. Cross (2014) makes the key point of distinction between CLIL and other language and content integration programs being a commitment to all aspects of Coyle's (2007) 4Cs framework, which requires that teaching incorporates a focus on content, communication, cognition and culture. The core theory underpinning the framework is that, 'It takes account of "integration" on different levels: learning (content and cognition), language learning (communication and cultures) and intercultural experiences' (Coyle, 2007, P. 550).

Based on the criterion of having overtly and explicitly adopted the 4Cs framework for their content-based teaching, only some of the Chinese programs discussed in the next section would be called CLIL by everyone. Other programs are rather, as they designate themselves, 'intensive' or 'enhanced' language programs. What unites these new programs is the integration of mainstream subject matter with Chinese language learning, with both equally valued.

Current programs

Richmond West Primary School has the longest running intensive Chinese program in Victoria. The bilingual program teaches content areas in Chinese over two full days each week in an immersion style: that is, with virtually no English used at all. Abbotsford Primary School bilingual program has also been running for some 25 years. Students engage in 10 hours of content learning in Chinese across the entire week, with students working in both English and Chinese for a part of every day. Originally designed as first language programs (for children who speak Chinese at home), both programs have more recently been developed and rejuvenated into second language immersion-based programs for the content areas of mathematics and 'integrated studies', which combines culture, art and craft, all taught through the medium of Chinese. They also teach explicit Chinese language development, integrating language conventions from the Victorian Curriculum: English with those of the non-intensive (second language) Chinese curriculum.

At Overnewton Anglican Community College, a CLIL Chinese program was set up in 2013, in which Foundation to Year 3 students learn their inquiry subject through Chinese for some 10% of curriculum time. At Auburn High School, the Chinese program in Years 7, 8 and 9 offers 40% of total curriculum time to teaching Science and Social Science in Chinese.

'Enhanced language programs', which provide a slightly lower time commitment, but which draw on CLIL and immersion teaching, can be found in both the independent and government sectors. The Chinese program at Wesley College's three junior campuses provides daily lessons in Chinese. In 2016 the Elstemwick campus began by providing their Foundation to Year 4 International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program Units of Inquiry through the medium of Chinese for 16% of students' class time, with the program to be expanded into Years 5 and 6 as the students move through the school. One feature of the Wesley enhanced language program curriculum structure is that initial Chinese literacy and spoken language learning, derived from the Units of Inquiry, are taught separately, in discrete lines of development, with some instruction and reflection in English undertaken in the weekly literacy lessons. This initiative was based on the content standards of the Australian Curriculum for Languages: Chinese and on consultation with experts in the field. The presence of more first language students at one campus has led to the Chinese program in Physical Education being taught with first language and second language students together, but learners are provided differentiated Unit of Inquiry lessons to cater to the very different needs of these two sets of learners.

The recently established Brunswick Southwest Primary School program provides three 30-minute Chinese lessons per week and teaches language and culture in Chinese through communicative topics as well as topics drawn from science and social studies. Each class combines students from three year levels together in the one class, as is done in all the teaching in the school. Teaching Chinese to these vertically grouped classes has required significant resource development and a close cooperative relationship between the Chinese teacher, participating homeroom teachers and the teaching assistant from China.

Whether these various structural differences in program result in different outcomes for learners may become known over time--and is an aspect that is calling out for research. Nonetheless, all of the Victorian programs face very similar challenges in planning for language, content integration and the second language learning demands of Chinese.

The challenges are outlined in the following section.

The challenges of Chinese

All languages present rich new concepts and significant learning information. These are called the 'powerful knowledge' of language learning (Yang 2013; Prescott 2016). Chinese--with its tones, characters and particular form of vocabulary (composed of only 1200 syllables, a great many homophones and virtually no English cognates) which confront an English speaker with very special new language information and learning demands--is potentially very powerful indeed.

Tone

Certain concepts of the Chinese sound system are very particular and must be explicitly taught if second language learners are to master them successfully. Firstly, just to process spoken Chinese, students must become cognitively aware of the tone of a syllable and know that it is part of its meaning, and this demand becomes more complex as they deal with ever changing tone combinations. Secondly, there are the physical challenges of managing the integration of tone with all the usual phonological features of stress (and de-stress), rhythm, chunking, intonation, pronunciation, and fluency. Gaining control of the pitch movements of quite ordinary utterances requires a great deal of practice.

Vocabulary

Chinese words have virtually no English cognates and hence the quantity of vocabulary to be learned is very large. This task is made harder by the enormous number of homophones in Chinese, each with a different meaning (and character). The second language student must learn to interpret context to know which syllable or word is meant.

Characters do not encode sound, and so to acquire vocabulary, students of Chinese need to learn the romanised writing system, Pinyin. Pinyin is used for both writing down and reading practice, and for character input using electronic devices. While many sounds are written just as they are in European languages, Pinyin also has it special letters and non-systematic representations of sound. Hence Pinyin needs to be taught carefully, especially to children still only novices in writing in English.

Characters

There can be little transfer of students' print literacy skills from English to Chinese. Every morpheme in Chinese is represented by an individual character. In order to read effectively in Chinese, students must learn to attach both a meaning and sound to each character, as well as master the sequence of strokes in order to write it. Characters vary greatly in their visual complexity, being composed of one or more basic character forms (components). Reading and writing in Chinese thus presents quite new concepts to be learned, including stroke categories, stroke order, the visual features of characters components, the overall graphic structure of each character, and how characters combine to form words. These new or unfamiliar concepts involved in developing Chinese print literacy skills must all be taught explicitly from the outset if learners are to have any measure of success in reading and writing in Chinese.

Program planning

Cross and Gearon's CLIL report (2013) for the Victorian Department of Education and Training sets out a very comprehensive list of necessary strategies and challenges to the viability of CLIL programs. The section on planning, in particular, reminds us that these are not easy programs to run and that much of their success lies in the work of teachers constructing a solid foundation. The prerequisite, the report says, is that:

[t]eachers recognise that CLIL planning takes substantial amounts of time and effort, with the primary tasks being:

1. analysing the mainstream curriculum from a second language teaching and learning perspective

2. mapping [target language] scope and sequence plans against curriculum content

3. diagnosing and assessing students' language needs and profiles

4. sourcing, translating, and creating specialist language teaching resources for curriculum content in the [target language] classroom, and

5. collaborating with content-area colleagues from non-Language departments (p. 48).

These requirements combined with the language challenges of Chinese make heavy demands on teachers preparing teaching plans for the programs discussed in this article.

Content

Usually the subject matter of the mainstream curriculum provides a choice of topics or unit sub-topics, from which some will be selected to be taught in Chinese. This is difficult because early stage learners have no language for discussing topics and need to be taught some of that language as well; and there is a constant need to limit the sheer quantity of new vocabulary. Anything translated into Chinese requires tight scrutiny to ensure it sounds Chinese and is culturally suitable as well.

Linguistic development

While initial guidance comes from the subject content, care also needs to be taken to systematically document the linguistic content at each age and stage. It is essential to check that linguistic development includes word and sentence types and progressively leads students to use more complex phrases and sentences. References for judging linguistic development include the Victorian Curriculum, commonly used textbooks and Chinese as a foreign language teacher resources, such as the Handbook on Grammar Teaching for International Chinese Teachers (Yang, 2013).

Assessment

There is significant effort required in planning for systematic checking and reporting on language development and the formal assessment of it and content at each level, with very little in the way of assistance already available.

Resource generation

The need to create, document and then resource content curriculum for each Unit of Inquiry or content area is particularly labour intensive in Chinese because of the need for distinct oral and literacy development tasks, and because even the knowledge needed to do this is far less developed than in other second languages.

Collaboration

To be successful, the curriculum development of units also requires close collaboration between the Chinese teacher and homeroom or subject teachers regarding content to be taught. The primary homeroom teachers' involvement is in modelling learning of the language and possibly also helping with classroom management.

Curriculum design and lesson sequencing

Developing fundamentally new oral and literacy skills is a lengthy process. Students quickly become overburdened when Chinese lessons combine aural/oral processing skills with visual processing skills while meeting new language. In commencing a unit, lessons must be carefully sequenced in order to develop aural memory before students can attach spoken words to the reading of characters.

Wider school support

The experience of developing Chinese language programs in Victorian schools has been very much in accordance with Cross and Gearon's (2013) suggested essentials for effective CLIL programs. For example, the authors say that there needs to be support throughout the school and from parents, and this has proven particularly true when parents have little experience with or understanding of the language being taught. In the programs discussed here, introductory presentations about Chinese language and learning, as well as about CLIL and content learning, were made to parents and to staff. Introductory Chinese language lessons have also been offered to these groups. Support of the teachers involved in teaching the CLIL programs has been essential. In various programs, this has involved regular consultation involving observation, discussion and feedback, tailored professional development sessions and formal CLIL training.

All of the Chinese immersion and enhanced programs mentioned earlier have to confront and resolve these challenges as a constant part of their teaching and learning program. But many are only in their early years and are still working with the language of beginner and intermediate students. However, the recent establishment of an immersion Chinese program in a high school, aiming to cater for graduates of intensive primary Chinese programs, has brought the task of intermediate to advanced language development into the spotlight and presented a host of new curriculum and pedagogy questions. These, and the responses of teachers to them, are set out as a case study in the next section.

A case study in content-based immersion Chinese

The first content-based immersion Chinese program in a Victorian secondary school for graduates of the two intensive primary Chinese programs in the state was set up in 2014 by two teachers, one of whom is co-author of this article. Creating the program has been a journey of trial and error, with work continually tested with students, reviewed and revised. The aspects presented here are those that have proved particularly necessary and successful.

Preparing the content

The subjects chosen for the secondary program in Chinese were Science and Social Studies. No textbooks were available for second language Chinese in either subject. Just translating from the English textbooks or using a textbook produced for Chinese speakers was not possible because the level of detail involved too much new vocabulary, much of it in an academic register as yet unfamiliar to the students. However, both textbooks served as guides in content preparation.

Other sources of information were offered by early English for Academic Purposes curriculum discussions, in particular, Widdowson's (1978) idea of 'a simple account': a simple but accurate presentation of the basic knowledge about the particular topic that it is intended students should learn, presented in natural but very pared down language.

Following this idea, selected topics and sub-topics in each area of the curriculum were written in one or more sets of simple sentences, which together made a succinct but comprehensive presentation of the knowledge the students were expected to learn. The process involved:

1. reading and understanding the curriculum

2. mapping out the unit and sequencing of the sub-topics

3. reading and translating the core content from the textbook, for example, Science Quest 7 (Lofts & Evergreen, 2014)

4. reading texts on the same topic in Chinese textbooks: Science Explorer (Padilla et al., 2013) and cross checking with the translation

5. drafting a simple account

6. checking on websites that the Chinese used was accurate and the common usage for that area of learning (e.g. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] not [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], for Bunsen burner)

7. editing the simple account so as to recycle grammatical structures if possible.

An example of the result is the following (translated) initial simple account for the Year 7 topic, The Greenhouse Effect.

1. During the day, sunlight shines through the atmosphere onto the ground, heating the surface of the Earth.

2 During the night, heat is radiated away from the surface of the Earth.

3. There are greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.

4. Greenhouse gases block part of the heat from radiation.

5. Gases blocking heat from radiation is called 'the greenhouse effect'.

6. Without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be too cold to live on.

7. Increasing the amount of greenhouse gases heats the Earth.

The length of a simple account varied from 900 to 1400 characters and took between 12 and 20 hours to teach, depending on how new the information and language were to the students. The process of writing a simple account could take up to eight hours in the beginning, but that reduced as the process became more familiar. Word choices (step 6) were often critical because of cultural and linguistic features. For instance, in discussing ocean currents, set terms such as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (warming and humidification) and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (cooling and dehumidification) are commonly used in Chinese, but there are no equivalent phrases in English. In describing the process of change, the various terms [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (form/become/convert to) are used according to the context, and on the topic of matter, 'solid' can be either [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (solid) or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (solid state). Provided the language was appropriate, recycling words from earlier units was another prime aim.

Widdowson's (1978) proposal was to use a simple account as the first step into the full topic, but in the secondary content-based Chinese program, the conceptual content as well as the language were new to the students, and hence each word had to be given an interpretable meaning, which slowed the pace. With new vocabulary offering no cognates and often bringing two or three new characters each, the burden on memory was considerable just to master one account, and so more elaborate texts were not introduced, although some topics were divided into sub-topics which each had their own simple account.

Exercises

In the initial stage of the unit, exercises on the content area topic were drawn from Cleland and Evans's (1984) Topic Approach to ESL, which, in turn, also drew on Widdowson (1978) and on Gattegno (1972). There were two underlying criteria in developing the exercises. Firstly, that questions and directives were in the form of natural discourse; hence, there were no artificial questions used as pedagogic devices. Secondly, that what the students did and produced should help their reading ability. Exercises required students to work from what they had absorbed of the information provided, testing students' understanding of the information and of the language used to frame it. The exercises included labelling illustrations and physically sorting out and ordering illustrated steps in processes. Writing tasks comprised cloze exercises, assessing statements as true or false, sentence joining, and sequencing. In written exercises, characters for new vocabulary showed pronunciation in Pinyin with tone marks when first used, but not when they appeared again.

Teaching the new

The simple account was first divided into a number of sections, which each formed a stage in the content learning. Widdowson advocated the use of illustrations, including maps, diagrams and tables, to assist with creating meaning for the language being introduced. In the Chinese program, visuals were used to convey meaning, and also actions, real objects and toys. As each simple account involved numerous unknown characters providing no sound for the words, new language was presented orally first, using techniques of the silent way method (Cleland & Evans, 1984; Gattegno, 1972; Orton&Cui, 2013).

Nouns and other lexical items were taught first, as labels to objects or illustrations. Miming was used to introduce actions and to practice the new vocabulary. Once the names and actions were established, simple sentences could be formed and sequenced, and then modifiers were added. Throughout the process, meaning was demonstrated and explained (in Chinese) by the teacher and questions were asked to check understanding. The same procedure was repeated to introduce the next sections. Finally, sentences from each section were joined to form 'an oral paragraph', which described the components and the dynamics of what was being shown. Students mimed and gestured to show the meaning of processes, and sequenced them in a logical order to show they understood causal procedures.

Once the students had learned the content orally, the new characters were introduced. Flashcards and matching exercises on Quizlet were used to help students learn the characters of the new vocabulary.

Assessment

Ongoing assessment took place throughout the teaching of the unit in a range of forms, including questions, worksheets and experiments. At the end of the unit, summative assessment was undertaken in the form of a test, a practical report, a poster or a presentation. Students also had conversations in English with the Head of Science, who assessed their understanding and skills against norms established for mainstream students. Despite the different language levels of the students, over three years all were found to have met the school's standard for science units.

Linguistic development

In addition to learning content, there was the need to teach students to develop their Chinese language skills so as to handle more complex academic discourse structures and registers, both receptively and productively. There were virtually no suitable resources available in second language Chinese aimed at creating a coherent, sequenced learning path in intermediate literacy. The teachers therefore compiled their own, drawing on material for heritage learners (who have effectively mother tongue oracy), on what little academic writing there was for developing tertiary students' written Chinese, and on the language content of their own lessons in science and social studies. The aim was to have the learners study basic Chinese sentence structures and paragraph writing, vocabulary building, the discourse features of different genres, and features specific to written Chinese that are not used in English. Details of this teaching are too specialised for this article, but are available in Orton, Zhang and Cui (2017).

There were two important language development issues encountered, which are common to all CLIL programs. Firstly, to successfully blend the language demands from two quite separate subjects, one which used the often highly specialist terms of science and the other which used language closer to daily life, although using many specific proper nouns for names and places. Secondly, in teaching which might move from presenting the specialist vocabulary of vertebrates and invertebrates in one stage and the features of igneous and sedimentary rocks in the next, there was a considerable challenge to deal with maintenance of language already met.

The matter of recycling vocabulary was achieved using two strategies. The first, to assist with internalising recently introduced words, involved embedding the words into exercises and texts used in language classes, often in quite fresh contexts from those in which they had first been encountered. These reading texts, which could be a story or argumentative essay, needed to be written by the teacher intentionally using a particular list of words learned earlier. This was very time-consuming and even so, the lack of appropriate reading material meant students were not able to benefit from a desirable level of recycling. The second method was to make words written in complex characters the focus of character deconstruction and analysis in script lessons and calligraphy work.

Resources

When the program started, almost the only resources available were the Victorian science and social studies curricula and textbooks. Without Chinese materials for the content, there was no way to know what was going to need to be addressed in terms of language, and hence it was impossible to prepare a systematic and coherent approach to integrating the language from the two content areas. While CLIL literature is often not very detailed about how this is to be done, as Swain (1996, p. 544) points out 'it does not necessarily happen automatically', and, as Mohan and Huang (2002, p. 406) remind us, 'it is needed'. This is all the more so in Chinese: teaching must be systematic, so that the affective and cognitive challenge presented by the endless lists of strange new words and characters can be accepted by students.

The wider school context

The subjects taught in Chinese overlapped in the area of language development and this meant there was a need for a coordinated approach. The two teachers thus needed time from their regular teaching allotment to be able to meet and discuss the course and create the resources required. These needs were not well understood by the school leadership and senior staff involved in timetabling--none of whom were language teachers, let alone familiar with Chinese--and they were not adequately met in the three years of the program. Furthermore, despite the publicly stated requirement that teachers in content-based programs need support and time (Fielding & Harbon, 2014; Orton, 2016), school leaders spoke throughout of wanting to get the teachers 'back to full allotment', as if their time off for program development was a privilege. Another issue from within the school was the pressure to take in and deal with stray first language students who arrived at any time, despite them knowing all the content and language being taught.

Despite these difficulties, students and teachers did manage to show that second language learners can make their way successfully in secondary subjects taught in Chinese, provided a lot of hard work is put in to developing the content and language according to a clear, systematic, theory-grounded approach. There is enormous scope for ongoing, essential research into, and evaluation of, such teaching and learning.

Conclusion

The new Chinese programs established in Victoria over the past few years show a considerable expansion of content-based Chinese teaching and learning. It is a move being matched in other Australian states, albeit in smaller numbers. While these Victorian programs could call on European CLIL literature and experience in other languages, developing content-based Chinese has demanded those ideas undergo considerable adaptation in order to serve the particular learning challenges of Chinese. It has also necessitated considerable further innovation, especially as the work expanded into the intermediate-advanced academic level in secondary schooling. While many of the challenges and solutions found are Chinese-specific, a number could also be of value in guiding advanced CLIL teaching in other languages.

Although these new programs can be fragile, the results are very positive. But, the successes have sown the seeds of new problems. At present, there is no longer a Victorian secondary school for primary school graduates of bilingual, immersion or CLIL Chinese programs to progress to, although a successor to the case study program is advertised for 2018. There has been a great loss of potential learning opportunities for graduates from the intensive primary language programs currently available. It is hoped that the many hundreds of students now involved in primary intensive Chinese programs will find a secure and well-established pathway for them to continue their intensive language learning when they transition into secondary school. This will require sound planning and should spark even greater innovation in the classroom, to the benefit of all.

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Claudia Prescott is an experienced Chinese language teacher in Victoria. She is currently teaching, and working as a Chinese Curriculum and Pedagogy consultant in schools. She is also Cofounder and Director of CSL Education, which runs After-school Chinese Immersion Programs. Between 2011 and 2015, she was a Research Assistant and Associate Staff Member at the Chinese Teacher Training Centre within the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, directed by Dr Jane Orton. Claudia has presented and published research on teacher training, developing teacher quality through oracy and innovation, good learners of Chinese, and powerful knowledge and the second language Chinese classroom.

Yin Zhang is a teacher at Auburn High School, which offered a bilingual Chinese-English program from 2014 to 2016. She was responsible for developing the program, in which she taught both the science and language components in Chinese to Years 7 and 8 students who were graduates of Richmond West Primary School's bilingual program. She presented on the content and language integrated learning approach used in this program at the Chinese as a Second Language Acquisition Research Conference in August 2016. She has collaborated on a chapter in an upcoming book detailing the underlying principles of the program. Yin presented on content and language integrated learning at the Bastow Leading Languages Course Teacher Panel in February 2016 and the MLTAV Conference in May 2014. Yin also developed CLIL Chinese units of work for teaching information and communication technologies as part of her Master of Teaching research at the University of Melbourne in 2013.