Over the centuries, People in China regard that food is an essential part of any celebration such as festivals and wedding anniversaries. Therefore, food maintains close ties with Chinese culture. Chinese cuisine appeared on the dinner table in Australia around 150 years ago and now it is very easy to find a Chinese restaurant in the city or a small country across the whole nation (Yang, 2013). Like Chinese people, Australians love to eat. It is likely that Australian students may have great interests in this topic and follow-up activities. Scarino and Liddicoat (2009) claim that language only creates its meaning in its cultural contexts and culture and language are fundamentally interrelated. It seems that successful language …show more content…
Compared to non-authentic/fabricated tasks which are created for the aim of language learning with emphasis on grammatical features and vocabularies, authentic tasks are considered to be of significant importance in facilitating learners in the real target language for communication in the real life. By the end of this unit, based on the learning intents, through using a variety of assessments focusing on four macro skills (i.e., listening, reading, writing and speaking), students can recognize the value of food as an important feature of Chinese culture and its relationship with festivals/celebrations. Assessments of four macro skills for the whole unit are designed to assess students learning and language capabilities of comprehension and conveying meaning. The assessment requirements set clear expectations and a reasonable work load for all the learners (See Macro Skills Assessment …show more content…
13) argues that “An authentic text is a stretch of real language, produced by a real speaker or writer for a real audience and designed to convey a real message of some sort”. For example, a video clip of popular TV program “A Laowai’s view of China and Taiwan” was used as audio text for listening assessment task. Another example of authentic text of assessment task is the content of reading evaluation. A newspaper article which targets Chinese readers is selected for the assessment. According to Gilmore (2011), authentic tasks can facilitate language learners’ communication competence. Through using this popular genre, students can enhance their understanding of genres of literacy and assessing their literacy skills for further learning by self-monitoring their performance during the assessment. It is likely that the results of assessment could inform teacher of learning needs of