Checking Wechat has been my daily habit. As a social media app, Wechat had been reported to have more than 200m subscribers at the end of 2013. Not only be the first in China, it’s now becoming popular in the US and UK. According to reports, it’s a trend that teens are attracted by such app from “traditional” media and have become the biggest group of consumers. Today’s teens are digital natives. As a foreign language teacher, I am thinking about how to use Wechat to get students more involved and active in Chinese teaching and learning.

The basic function of Wechat is to handle voice message, snapshots and emoticons. Compared to pure text materials, these kinds of interesting ways of communication more adapt to adolescents’ features. As complementary to the communication in class, some teachers have begun to use Wechat to help students practice out of class. For example, they may set up an instant group including all students. The teacher may share articles, videos and images related to the class with students at any time. They may send voice messages with students to help them practice pronunciation. It’s useful for Chinese learning, because students are able to practice reading and listen to the pronunciation repeatedly. However, since the group is more like a public square, it’s easy to be immersed by overwhelming messages and spend too much time on reading and replying, both for the teacher and the students. In addition, some students may keep quiet all the time.

Wechat has another wonderful function named “Official Accounts”. Everyone can open his/her own official account to post interesting information. Subscribers are able to reply with text, image or voice messages. In my future class, I plan to open an official account. All the students can subscribe it. I may post homework, extended reading materials or oral exercises through the account and comment with each student through the interactive function. It’s different from the group, because just I can see or hear the response from each student. Compared to group communication, this way has more pros. As experiencing physical and psychological changes, adolescents need more space. On the one hand, through such private communication, I may encourage each student by different ways to protect their self-esteem. For example, I can correct a less-talent student’s pronunciation without hurting him. I can also post some information in the need of their changes and communicate with them. On the other hand, I may avoid being over disturbed by students’ messages or spending too much time on response. I may post homework or assignments at designated time, set responding deadline for students and handle responses from students in regular time. In addition, I can also invite students to help me design and post, in order to make the teaching and learning more fun.

Compared to other more media like Facebook or Tweeter, Wechat is more suitable for Chinese teaching and learning. First, although there is “Moments” function, it’s less open and nearly no advertisements comparatively. You can just see the contents your connected friends have authorized to you. Second, since it’s the dominant social media in China, there are more materials in Chinese can be shared through Wechat. I also imagine that I can find a peer in China for each student to help him or her to learn Chinese through Wechat.

Of course, I have some concerns about over using the app. Students may misunderstand that the teacher encourage them to use such kind of medias. However, since it’s a trend for teens immersed by media, teachers can set rules with students and use such kinds of media to engage students in language learning classes more actively.