The Rise of China: Lesson 1

For me, getting stuck into the first lesson is always the hardest part of writing a History unit. The reason for this is one of those questions that historians have argued over for a considerable amount of time: where do historical events start?

So - how far back should I go in giving students background for the era of Chinese history that we'll be examining? The sequence of cause and effect in history can run on and on and on if you look hard enough. And that's if you're a believer in cause and effect - some historians look at history and just see it as a series of random events, or thing that correlate with (rather than cause) each other.

For the sake of student and teacher sanity, I decided to cut my background off around the year 1900, and I took the approach of implying causation between certain events rather then directly stating such things. It's not really the teacher's place to get all hardline about which events caused which, that's something that should be left open for Year 10 students to deduce - especially since there are no real right or wrong answers about cause and effect. Having said that, relevant information still needs to be presented so students can draw some conclusions with relative ease.  

Before I go on with justifying my choices, I'll start with the lesson plan,

Lesson 1: Background to Modern China

1. Students read passage on screen (Resource 1-1) and answer questions in their books.

2. Explain lexical density to students using text on screen, hand students their own version of the text (Resource 1-2). Lexical density refers to the amount of 'content' words in a text - these are any verbs, nouns, adverbs or adjectives. Work with students to identify all of these words in the paragraph. Students then divide these words by the total amount of words to determine a percentage. This is the lexical density of the text. A well-written text should be between 55% and 70%. If it's too high then it's overwritten, and if it's too low then it's too much like conversation/spoken language.

3. Students work on linking sections of the text together - IE. Different words that refer to the same thing. See teacher notes (Resource 1-3)

4. Students write sentences about China that use the following terms from the text:

• Dominate/dominated
• Shanghai
• Dynasty
• Modernise/modernisation
• Longyu

5. If time, students/teacher use lexical density test to examine student writing after sentences have been composed.

I've left the last step optional for time reasons. Without seeing the lesson in a live classroom it's hard to gauge how it will all play out. But that's one of the magical things about teaching, right? Here's a more detailed break down of each step with some accompanying theory...

Step 1

Resource 1-1 is a short paragraph that has been designed to give students an overview of CHina between 1900 and the modern day. It's a difficult thing to squeeze that much history into such a small word count but it's important that this text is kept relatively short so that we have time to do all the teacherly things with it, and so that students don't become disengaged while reading. It's been written as something that will also fit nicely onto the whiteboard as a projection. Anyway, here's the text:

The Beginning of Modern China (1900-1912)

In 1900, China's glory days were behind her. China was a nation in a decline. In 1900, China was heavily controlled by foreign nations such as England, Germany and France, who tended to dominate the ports such as Shanghai. China was ruled by the royal Qing dynasty, who were from Manchuria (now known as Korea). After losing a series of small wars to Britain and France, China had to hand over the strategically important port of Hong Kong to Britain. Many in China blamed the Qing family for their humiliation at the hands of European powers. The Chinese Empress Dowager refused to modernise China, leading to many Chinese states rebelling and 'breaking away' from her rule. In 1912, after much negotiations, Longyu gave up her power so that Chinese politicians could form their own government to save China. This brought an end to 2000 years of Imperial China. 

I've followed this with four relatively straightforward comprehension questions to get the students talking around the text and writing straight away about the new topic. These questions are:

1. Who controlled China during this time?
2. Why do you think this is?
3. What does the word 'modern' mean?
4. Why were the Qing Dynasty forced to step down from their throne?

Despite their simplicity, the purpose of these questions are manifold. The first and second questions are designed to get the students thinking about China's relationship with other countries - something that underpins Chinese justification for their foreign policy during much of the 20th and 21st centuries. The third question starts the students thinking about their vocabulary (something that forms a large part of this unit) and the fourth question brings the students to their starting point - the disruption and collapse of China's traditional past. Each question gets the student to engage with the text on a surface level whilst also pushing them (hopefully) to a level of comprehension that goes beyond word-level recognition. When students are able to push past getting bogged down on understanding singular words they can then move to whole-sentence and, better yet, whole-text levels of comprehension. Each of these questions asks for engagement at one or more of these different levels.

Step 2

Resource 1-2 is much the same as Resource 1-1, only spaced-out to allow for the lexical density test and the cohesion analysis that comes in Step 3 of the lesson. Step 1 of the lesson focuses on a document projected onto a screen/whiteboard rather than a student copy of the text because I don't want the kids to get hung up on the new term 'lexical density' before they even read the source and engage with the actual content. 

Step 2 allows the students to have a sheet (Resource 2-1) so that they can now move beyond the content to look at how the text has been constructed. It's easy to think of text construction as an English domain but by examining grammar in History students can build up their own contextual knowledge and drill down into the intentions of the source's writer - things that are very pertinent when it comes to source analysis. I find the idea of using grammar to analyse sources quite exciting because it's a very grounded way for students to engage with source work, and any History teacher knows how unenthused students can get when faced with the higher order skills that accompany source analysis!

After students have been introduced to both the concept of lexical density and how this reveals the difference between written vs. spoke-like text, well, then it's time for the class to get stuck into looking at how the text works at a grammatical level. 

Step 3

Resource 1-3 provides some notes for teachers to use in assisting students to find text chains in the source. A 'text chain' is simply a series of arrows/lines drawn between highlighted words in a text. These chains show words that refer to the same idea, and demonstrate how extended vocabulary can be beneficial to making a text more cohesive. This explicit engagement with the grammar also allows students to get a more in-depth contextual understanding of the text - for example, realising that 'Dynasty' and 'royal family' refer to the same thing, or that the Chinese Empress Dowager's name is Longyu. 

Once students have begun acknowledging the lexical density of the source and decoding some of these previously unfamiliar words it's then necessary that we get them to actually use at least a few of these new terms in context, hence Step 4 of the lesson plan. The decoding that accompanies the process of building text chains is also a useful skill for students to learn as it helps them build fluency when reading. 

Step 4

The Focus on Reading research shows that simply defining new terms and getting students to write these definitions down is a fairly ineffective way of broadening vocabulary and has very little impact on student learning. What's much more meaningful is getting students to talk about the meanings of these new terms and then wrestle with the words directly by placing them into new sentences. Using the terms is what makes those synapses fire! If we're ever to get students to write well then we need them to build up their toolkit of lexical knowledge... that means increasing their vocabulary by getting them to actually use new words.

Step 5

Then, if the teacher gets through all of this and has some time left over in the lesson, students can examine the lexical density of their new sentences from Step 4. This information won't really be for them by the teacher can collect it as a form of diagnostic pre-testing and compare it to student samples taken from the assessment task at the end of the unit.

Links to each of the resources can be found here:
Resource 1-1: The Beginning of Modern China
Resource 1-2: Student Copy
Resource 1-3: Teacher Notes