K-12 Chinese Language Teaching, Issue 5

Keywords: The Flat Stanley Project, Chinese as a Foreign Language, L2 Chinese, cross
culture, context-based language learning, pen pals, post-pandemic learning, technology-based
learning
Introduction
Flat Stanley is an American children's book series written by author Jeff Brown and
illustrated by Tomi Ungerer (Hoewisch,2001). Dale Hubert (1995), a special education teacher,
designed “The Flat Stanley Project” (FSP), for his third-grade students in London, Ontario,
Canada. Teachers can integrate the FSP in their pedagogical practice— having students read the
stories, create their own Flat Stanley paper puppet, and send them through mail to family or
friends who live far away. Then, the person who receives Flat Stanley takes the paper puppet to
places and get pictures with it, collect souvenirs, and send it back to the student (Hoewich,
2001). The FSP has been applied in different classrooms to reinforce the learning in different
subject areas such as social studies, science, math, reading, and writing. In the field of FL
education, the goal of the project is to facilitate language learning among elementary students,
and thus increase their skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and storytelling (Patterson,
2005). We propose an application of the FSP into L2 Chinese learning to allow students to
connect with the language they are learning, and to give students a chance to practice the four
skills- listening, speaking, reading, and writing as well as integrate with three communications
modes- interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational (IPA-Integrated Performance Assessment,
2021) in a culturally relevant and meaningful context. In this paper, we explore the following
research questions:
What do three “The Flat Stanley Project” cases in Taiwan reveal about language and
cultural learning?
How can teachers apply “The Flat Stanley Project” to teach Chinese language and
culture, and teach information about Taiwan?
To answer these questions, we first present a brief review of the literature that shows how
this project has been applied. Then, we qualitatively analyze three successful cases of the
application of the project in Taiwan through the lenses of the three communication modes
(National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015) in both immersion and non-immersion
programs. Hence, we present a pedagogical proposal of the application of the FSP in a CFL
class, and finally, we draw the conclusion about the application of this project.