Li Bin - English and Chinese’s interdisciplinary links - Hong Kong

In this episode, I’m speaking with Li Bin. Bin is a Deputy Head of School here in Hong Kong and formerly Asia-Pacific Regional Manager for the International Baccalaureate’s Middle Years Programme. On top of that, she is a deeply experienced teacher of Chinese and has worked with many schools that offer bilingual instruction.

Our chat is the fourth conversation in a series of discussions designed to learn more about secondary subjects and their possible interdisciplinary links with English. My intrigue in doing these is to see whether there are possibilities for connections across subjects that are at least shared in passing during class or actually and more excitingly, the basis of complex interdisciplinary units.

We discuss:

• The products, processes or texts that are at the heart of studying Chinese Language and Literature

• The deep concepts that an expert in Chinese uses to make meaning from these phenomena

• The potential links that Chinese and English share from a conceptual or disciplinary point of view

• And lastly, possible projects that students could work on to better understand both languages, simultaneously.

Thanks so much to Bin for providing me with incredibly substantial but eloquent answers that did so much to enlighten my understanding of Chinese and the similarities it might share with English teaching.

If you’d like to be kept up to date on when chat like this happens, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and follow me on LinkedIn @chrisjordanhk or X @chrisjordanhk

Additionally, if you would like a head start on learning how to prioritise your middle years English curriculum, head to the bottom of this podcast’s show notes or top of my stream on X to find a beta copy of my forthcoming book: Make Middle Years English Matter. You can read as much as you want and even highlight elements that you like, dislike or find confusing to help make it better.

Links:

Beta version of Make Middle Years English Matter