Happy Chinese New Year! The Year of the Rabbit begins on Sunday 22nd January 2023. The rabbit is associated with peace, longevity, intelligence, elegance and auspiciousness in Chinese culture. This peaceful, contemplative creature should imbue your EFL teaching learning and teaching with gentle strength and diligence this year. Chinese tradition dictates that 2023 will be filled with quiet, steady and effective progress, along with a touch of witty humour!

The Chinese New Year is a great time for a seasonal EFL lesson. Learning about other cultures and traditions is always interesting and a great way to learn more English, so we’ve prepared a fun comprehension exercise for your next EFL lesson relating to Chinese New Year!

 

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit in EFL

As an EFL student, the characteristics of the rabbit should help you with its patient approach to pursuing new goals.

This positive rabbit characteristic should help you feel a strong sense of commitment to your studies and encourage a responsible approach to learning this year. You might want to use the rabbit’s quiet and patient approach and excellent memory to take on new challenges and try using more difficult aspects of the language.

You could take advantage of this year’s responsible, intelligent rabbit vibe to develop a timetable for study, as rabbits have close attention to detail and are always keen to adapt their methods to suit a new project.

The rabbit’s sensitive personality means you might also feel inclined to help other learners by finding a penpal or language exchange buddy and practising together.

However, the rabbit can be overly sensitive, insecure and too cautious, while rabbits are not always the most decisive creatures and they hate taking risks.

Rabbit tendencies could mean you are more likely to pursue only your favourite areas of study due to a fear of making mistakes. It’s important to remember to study areas of difficulty too, such as false friends and words with tricky pronunciation this year.

Be careful to take extra care over confusing words for EFL learners during 2023, so the negative rabbit characteristics doesn’t undermine your progress.

For teachers, the Year of the Rabbit might bring up some overly cautious tendencies, as the rabbit personality can sometimes find it hard to embrace new or difficult challenges. To overcome this, remember to give students plenty of scope to try new learning methods and challenge themselves with complex material, which will help them to progress their skills.

 

Try to take advantage of the patient and careful side of the rabbit’s character and foster its natural attraction to closely detailed work. These useful rabbit traits will help you to support students with their language learning goals throughout the year.

EFL Lesson Plans for Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is a great time for developing some interesting learning materials, especially using comprehension exercises.

Comprehension exercises are a useful way to help students with all their English language skills – reading, listening, writing and speaking.

The target text can be presented written down for reading practice and also read aloud for EFL listening practice.

Afterwards, the students can answer questions or fill in the blanks to practice writing skills, then read their final text aloud to practice speaking in English.

So let’s learn a bit more about the traditions of the Chinese New Year:

EFL Comprehension Exercise for Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year is a very important Chinese holiday as traditionally it is a time to honour one’s ancestors and the gods. This traditional Chinese festival is also called the Lunar New Year and the Spring Festival.

Chinese New Year’s Day begins on the first day of the first lunar month in the Chinese calendar.

The exact day that Chinese New Year’s Day falls will change every year because of the variations in the Chinese zodiac, but it always falls on a day between 21st January and 20th February.

At Chinese New Year, children are traditionally given money in red paper envelopes as presents from relatives and red lanterns are hung in people’s houses.

There are also many street parties with loud, brightly coloured fireworks. The celebrations continue until Lantern Day, on the 15th of the first lunar month of the new year.

Chinese New Year Traditions

Cleaning

Traditionally, Chinese people spring clean their houses on the evening before Chinese New Year’s Day. This is so that they can prepare their homes for the incoming good luck that the New Year will bring.

Decorations

Homes are decorated with red lanterns and colourful banners displaying messages of luck and good wishes for the new year.

Fireworks

Magnificent displays of fireworks light up the sky at midnight for many Chinese people. This tradition began as a way to scare away the mythical monster Nian, which is said to appear at that time!

Flowers

Certain flowers are popular at Chinese New Year time, such as orchids, peonies, peach blossoms and narcissus.

Orchids are known as fertility flowers, favoured for their image of luxury and refinement and these flowers are often given as presents.

Narcissus is a symbol of good fortune in Chinese culture, so this flower is also highly popular at Chinese New Year.

Lucky foods

People gather with friends and family to feast on special lucky meals at Chinese New Year, incorporating not only lucky foods but also lucky methods of food preparation and ways of eating.

Lucky foods include fish, spring rolls, dumplings and nian gao (sweet, sticky rice cakes). The sweet rice cake symbolises the personal growth we should aim for each year.

Other popular foods at Chinese New Year include long noodles (‘longevity’ noodles) and orange or golden coloured fruit (‘good fortune’ fruit), such as oranges.

EFL ‘Fill the Gaps’ Exercise for Chinese New Year:

Chinese New Year is a very important Chinese ________1________. This time of year is also called the Lunar New Year or ________2________.

Chinese New Year’s Day begins on the _______3_________ day of the first lunar month in the Chinese calendar. The 15th day of the first lunar month is called _____4___________. The exact date of Chinese New Year’s Day_______5_______ every year because of Chinese zodiac.

One of the ______6__________  on Chinese New Year’s Day is that you should _________7_______ your house, so you will prepare your home for the good luck of the year ahead, while many people also _________8_______ their homes with colourful banners.

Children traditionally receive ________9________ as presents on this day and red lanterns are hung in people’s ________10________. To celebrate Chinese New Year people hold _________11_______ in the streets and let off brightly coloured, noisy ________12________.

 

People eat special foods at Chinese New Year, such as _______13_______ fruit, which the Chinese call ‘good fortune’ fruit. Other popular foods include nian gao, which are sweet sticky _______14_______.They also give flowers as gifts, such as narcissus, which is known as a symbol of  _______15_______.

Answers: 

1. holiday, 2. Spring Festival, 3. first, 4. Lantern Day, 5. changes / moves / alters, 6. traditions, 7. clean, 8. decorate, 9. money in red paper envelopes, 10. homes/houses, 11. parties, 12. fireworks, 13. orange or golden coloured, 14. rice cakes, 15. luck / good fortune

There are many more exercises you can create for EFL students using the Chinese New Year as a theme.

Some more ideas would be a ‘choose the right word’ exercise where instead of gaps, there are two options of words the student could use – one is correct and one is incorrect.

This ‘true or false’ exercise is a great way for students to improve English vocabulary knowledge as it gives them a simple test, while keeping the words in context.

Other ideas include correcting scrambled sentences and matching two halves of a sentence. All the exercises should use the main text as a starting point.

Students could also ask each other questions about the text, orally or as a written exercise. This can be done in pairs, small groups or as a whole class.

The Chinese Zodiac

Most people are familiar with the Western zodiac and some of you may check your horoscopes, but not everyone is familiar with the Chinese zodiac.

In Chinese culture, each year corresponds to one of the twelve different animals in the zodiac: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.

Below is a zodiac wheel featuring all the animals and their corresponding years. The Chinese New Year starts each year at some point between 21st January and 20th February, so if your birthday is between these dates, it could be different from the chart.

For example, if you were born anytime after 20th February during 1980, your animal is the Monkey. If you were born before 21st January in 1980, your animal will be from the year before, which is the Sheep (this year is sometimes called the Goat).

Each animal in the Chinese Zodiac has different characteristics. For example: Sheep are intelligent, gentle and studious, while Rats are charming, sociable and artistic; Horses are courageous and adventurous, while Roosters are honest, intelligent and confident.

All the animals also have negative character traits, such as the pettiness of the Ox, the jealousy of the Rat, the pessimism of the Pig and the vanity of the Rooster.

These Chinese zodiac animals can form another part of the EFL lesson for Chinese New Year. For example, students can work out their own Chinese animal and learn the character traits associated with them.

This is a good way to discuss vocabulary related to characteristics and personalities, both positive and negative.

Chinese New Year Parades

Chinese New Year is always an exciting time and the London Chinese New Year parade is always a huge attraction filled with dancing, music and bright costumes.

This parade is the biggest Chinese New Year parade in Europe and people can be sure of a wonderful, vibrant and eventful celebration.

The parade normally starts at 10am with colourful parade floats and dragon dances moving along Charing Cross Road into Shaftesbury Avenue, before arriving in Chinatown. There is also a range of exiting cultural activities for all the family in Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square.

 

Chinese New Year during the Covid pandemic

In 2021 and 2022, the celebrations were much more muted because of the Coronavirus pandemic, which meant some activities were cancelled. However, we could still enjoy the occasion in a quieter way at home with traditional Chinese food, decorations and presents.

The main London parade usually features the ‘dragon dance’, the ‘flying lion dance’, a variety show, comedy, acrobatics, martial arts, opera, live performances and fireworks.

During the pandemic, many people danced in their homes, on balconies, in gardens and via video chats around the world!

 

For those looking to create an EFL lesson themed on Chinese New Year, it would be interesting for students to explore the area of Chinatown in London by reading about its history and discussing it as a group.

This could be a good time to show a video of the costumes, music, dancing and traditional parades of the New Year festival, along with some of the more exotic elements, such as acrobatics and martial arts.

As the rabbit hops into 2023 to promise us a year filled with steady academic progress, there are practically limitless ways you can incorporate Chinese New Year in the EFL classroom!

How will you celebrate the Chinese Year of the Rabbit?

Do you celebrate Chinese New Year?

Teachers, what lesson plans or ideas do you have for Chinese New Year?

Will you be organising any remote Chinese New Year celebrations this year?

Chinese readers, do let us know about your first-hand experiences of Chinese New Year – we’d love to learn more about your festival.

What foods do you eat at this time? Do you give any presents?

Share your ideas, thoughts, plans and experiences in the comments box!