"All roads lead to Rome", this world famous saying plays an important role in encouraging teachers of Chinese to continuously explore new teaching/learning strategies. “Life is limited, while knowledge is infinite.’ At present，in the field of Chinese language teaching, varieties of methods have been created and rapidly developed, leading to effective results. The Chinese teachers at Monkseaton Confucius Classroom are well aware of the importance of teaching methods. They are studying, absorbing, incorporating many other successful practical skills, and meanwhile are exploring teaching methods to meet the needs of those local students. Recently they have experienced a new method in Chinese teaching - Spaced learning. On 20th March 2012, at a secondary school, in North Tyneside, UK, Spaced learning was initially used in Mandarin class, which resulted in great interest and exciting effect.

Spaced Learning is based on a discovery about the brain that was published in 2005 by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American. With the leadership of Dr Paul Kelley, the method of Spaced Learning was first put into practice in other science subjects by his group at Monkseaton High School. Actually, it has been introduced and implemented in many other countries. A well-known expert Xiaoqing Xie in educational assessment also stated that the spaced learning method should be applied in China.

A Spaced Learning session consists of three ‘inputs’ divided by 10-minute breaks, which students spend doing a simple activity, and make sure the students do a ‘distractor’ activity which is very different from what they’re doing during the inputs, a physical activity is preferable.

In the Chinese class, Miss Jie Qi carried out three inputs by putting all the knowledge and skills learnt in the past 3 months in 3 three different sessions. The first input is a fast-paced presentation of information by the teacher, the second input focuses on recalling information by filling in the blanks, and the third focuses on understanding information by more interaction such as making conversations and doing performance. During these breaks, they carried out different types of physical activities to allow students ‘rest’, such as paper cutting, shuttlecock, silk dance and the like with traditional Chinese cultural features. Of course, she has also prepared to introduce the tai chi, origami, etc. As a consequence, the children were fully engaged in class, with no feeling of fatigue, but getting consolidation of memory, and became more interested in Chinese culture as well as its language. Kill many birds with one stone!