Wednesday, November 23, 2022

When Bubble Milk Tea Meets English



Making bubble milk tea from scratch and then introducing the ingredients, supplies, and steps in English

 

Ten elementary school students, a student teacher, and I had a good time making bubble milk tea and an English-speaking video. The idea is to get the CLJH students-to-be to enjoy this intriguing course and increase the enrollment chances next year.

 

1.     Fun facts about the bubble milk tea

 

Before it was invented in the 1990s, people always drank their tea hot. Then bubble black tea shops caught on in Taichung and became a popular place for people to hang out. Legend has it that Chun Shui Tang was the very first tea shop that came up with a brilliant idea: mixing milk tea with "bubbles", or tapioca balls, so that people could enjoy drinking and "eating" the tea at the same time.

 

2.     How to custom order in English

 

When ordering your bubble milk tea here in Taiwan, you'd get asked about the sugar and ice level of it:

l  regular sugar/ice

l  less sugar

l  half sugar

l  quarter sugar/easy ice

l  no sugar/sugar-free/no ice/ice-free

 

3.     Ingredients

 

To make bubble milk tea, you only need tapioca starch, brown sugar, milk, and tea. Of course, there are loads of variations. If you want, you can even put your tapioca balls in ramen noodle soup, which is a bizarre combination, if you ask me. For those elementary students, I didn't use any tea, though. 

 

4.     Kitchen utensils

 

You'll need a pot, spoon, bowl, rolling pin, scale, knife, gas stove, and plastic wraps. Some of them are not easy to come by in the school, so you can ask if there are any already available. Of course, safety is always our number one priority, so you'll have to warn your students not to play with the knife or fire.  

 

5.     English-speaking voice-over

 

My original goal was to use the webcam and dynamic microphone to make a video with OBS. The students were camera-shy, so I tweaked the plan and got them to do voice-overs instead. Each of them read a sentence or two on Audacity. After some simple editing, I put together some video clips and turned them into an English-speaking video introducing how they made bubble milk tea from scratch.  

 

I spoke only in English for half an hour for the first two parts and then switched to Mandarin. One of the students told me he had been tricked into believing I was a foreigner because of my accent. The first batch was so good that everybody rushed to scoop and devour it. Some students were naughty and fooling around throughout the whole class, so I was distracted and deviated from the English-only policy. However, I was glad we got the voice-over done and had a great student end product for the course.   

 

Without Ciou Liying, Director 350, and the student teacher, I couldn’t make this happen. 


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