ABSTRACT
Asking beginning-level language learners to envision themselves successfully using the language and navigating the target culture is always a challenge. Using the PCA pedagogy, this chapter demonstrates how to develop and adapt local learning activities into lower-level performance-based classroom exercises. Students build connections among their language learning, domestic campus life, and the target community. By incorporating local details about a specific environment into a language class, less familiar regional customs and context-specific behaviors get more easily incorporated into students' stories and memories of using Chinese in highly detailed and closely associated aspects of their lives. Two types of localized learning activities are introduced in this chapter: activities that include campus-specific contexts and information and activities that bridge learners toward the target cultural environment. Second language (L2) students are able to establish their future memories of using the language for real-life purposes even at an early stage of learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).
