Does anyone know what the general consensus is on this? If I finish a textbook/ kids story book should I go back and re-read it?
The problem I have is that I loose interest the second time around and just want to move onto the next book. However I still can’t recognise every single word in the first book and still need to perform the dictionary lookup procedure.
Is there a comprehensible input theory on this?
Thanks
Emphatically – yes!!
Repeated reading is the major way of acquiring fluency in reading, which is what you want.
This is another reason not to pick books that are too far above your level – too much dictionary work and you really just don’t want to bother after the first time through (assuming you get through it the first time). 
Our experiments in reading instruction are showing that with the use of repeated reading (more varied than in your situation as we are working in a class and can use different techniques and different groups), students of Mandarin as a second language can learn characters without ever studying them separately, and without any instruction in characters prior to reading. This, however, is in reading lessons with teachers running them. But the results we’re getting are definitely pointing to the value of repeated reading of the same text.
The biggest enemy of language study is boredom. If a textbook or task is not holding your interest, you might end up putting it off or stop altogether, which of course negates any other theoretical benefits.
Just move onto the next book. You can always come back and review the first book at a later date; you’ll be surprised at how much more you understand.
[quote=“aphasiac”]
Just move onto the next book. You can always come back and review the first book at a later date; you’ll be surprised at how much more you understand.[/quote]
Unfortunately, this is the problem with most courses. “Just keep going.” Don’t ever take the time to master anything – God forbid you don’t keep marching onward. Of course, the fact that you never actually acquire anything along the way will eventually snowball and come back to bite you in the rear.
As a person studying on your own, you have the luxury of not letting your progress through materials be paced by someone else. Don’t give that up. Try to pick more appropriate reading materials in the first place (more interesting/fewer unknowns) and re-reading will not be very onerous.
How? Do you at least go over the characters first in some way?
Nope.
We took students with zero Chinese, and gave them a week’s worth of language instruction (TPRS-based, though in the particular setting they were in, they also had a “task-based class”, but we did not use vocabulary from that class since it wasn’t really acquired by that point). Then we threw a reading at them – 600 characters long, containing 35 unique characters. We did not show them a Chinese character beforehand, we didn’t give them a list, we didn’t talk about radicals or character parts or anything. We just put the text in front of them and started reading it with them, and said, “You join in [reading out loud] when you’re ready.” It took about 3 pages, and everyone was reading out loud together. We faded the teacher voice lead, and they kept reading. We checked comprehension using translation, and they were understanding what they read.
We repeated this reading in various ways (shared reading, choral reading, pair reading, reader’s theater) for four days (50 minutes of class per day). Then we gave a test. We thew another Chinese text at the students – unrelated to the story they’d been reading in class. It contained the same characters, but it had nothing to do with the text they’d been reading. There were no pictures and no context at all with the test (there were illustrations with the class text, and obviously the class had discussed what was going on in the text). Every student was able to read the text and answer comprehension questions in English – demonstrating that the character recognition skills carried over, despite the total lack of direct instruction in characters.
HOWEVER – what makes this work is the fact that the students are reading KNOWN LANGUAGE. All the teachers who hear about this want a copy of the “magic text”. But the magic isn’t in the text. It’s really simple – it’s easy to teach someone to read a second language (a person who’s already literate in another language, I mean) if they are reading language they already have in their heads. If they are reading stuff they don’t really have solidly in their heads, it’s a whole different story – and one that most of us were subjected to during our Chinese study.
As the students become more advanced, they will be able to tolerate more unknowns in the readings, because they will have more structural knowledge of Chinese, and more vocabulary, so that they can make intelligent guesses and use reading strategies to make meaning. But for beginners, we have to keep unknowns to a minimum, or exclude them totally. Not teaching characters separately is certainly a great time-saver, though, not to mention all the materials preparation, correcting, and general wear-and-tear.
I should mention, too – I am not against teaching radicals or character parts and so on. I just don’t believe they are things worth spending class time on when someone has had less than, say, a couple hundred hours of Chinese study. Beginners need fluency, not analysis. Later, when someone gets to a more advanced point with Chinese, and wants/needs to learn those things, great. But I strongly believe we need to prioritize when dealing with beginners, or else no one would ever get to the intermediate level (hmmm…kinda like what’s been happening for a long time now, where relatively few people end up fluent.)
[quote=“ironlady”]Nope.
We took students with zero Chinese, and gave them a week’s worth of language instruction (TPRS-based, though in the particular setting they were in, they also had a “task-based class”, but we did not use vocabulary from that class since it wasn’t really acquired by that point). Then we threw a reading at them – 600 characters long, containing 35 unique characters. We did not show them a Chinese character beforehand, we didn’t give them a list, we didn’t talk about radicals or character parts or anything. We just put the text in front of them and started reading it with them, and said, “You join in [reading out loud] when you’re ready.” It took about 3 pages, and everyone was reading out loud together. We faded the teacher voice lead, and they kept reading. We checked comprehension using translation, and they were understanding what they read.
We repeated this reading in various ways (shared reading, choral reading, pair reading, reader’s theater) for four days (50 minutes of class per day). Then we gave a test. We thew another Chinese text at the students – unrelated to the story they’d been reading in class. It contained the same characters, but it had nothing to do with the text they’d been reading. There were no pictures and no context at all with the test (there were illustrations with the class text, and obviously the class had discussed what was going on in the text). Every student was able to read the text and answer comprehension questions in English – demonstrating that the character recognition skills carried over, despite the total lack of direct instruction in characters.
HOWEVER – what makes this work is the fact that the students are reading KNOWN LANGUAGE. All the teachers who hear about this want a copy of the “magic text”. But the magic isn’t in the text. It’s really simple – it’s easy to teach someone to read a second language (a person who’s already literate in another language, I mean) if they are reading language they already have in their heads. If they are reading stuff they don’t really have solidly in their heads, it’s a whole different story – and one that most of us were subjected to during our Chinese study.
As the students become more advanced, they will be able to tolerate more unknowns in the readings, because they will have more structural knowledge of Chinese, and more vocabulary, so that they can make intelligent guesses and use reading strategies to make meaning. But for beginners, we have to keep unknowns to a minimum, or exclude them totally. Not teaching characters separately is certainly a great time-saver, though, not to mention all the materials preparation, correcting, and general wear-and-tear.[/quote]
Totally agree with you but a quick question. How much of the “reading” comprehension is aided by the fact that reading aloud turns the text into a listening also text and students are therefore able to hear the word while they read it?
[quote=“ironlady”]Nope.
We took students with zero Chinese, and gave them a week’s worth of language instruction (TPRS-based, though in the particular setting they were in, they also had a “task-based class”, but we did not use vocabulary from that class since it wasn’t really acquired by that point). Then we threw a reading at them – 600 characters long, containing 35 unique characters. We did not show them a Chinese character beforehand, we didn’t give them a list, we didn’t talk about radicals or character parts or anything. We just put the text in front of them and started reading it with them, and said, “You join in [reading out loud] when you’re ready.” It took about 3 pages, and everyone was reading out loud together. We faded the teacher voice lead, and they kept reading. We checked comprehension using translation, and they were understanding what they read.
[/quote]
Doing something like this was one of the most memorable experiences of my time in Chinese classes. (Only one teacher did anything like it (American guy) and he only taught the summer class.) Keep up the good work, Ironlady; a lot of people are going to owe their Chinese fluency to you 
[quote=“E04teacherlin”]
Totally agree with you but a quick question. How much of the “reading” comprehension is aided by the fact that reading aloud turns the text into a listening also text and students are therefore able to hear the word while they read it?[/quote]
No need to put “comprehension” in quotes. This is a training process. Comprehension isn’t 100% from reading along at first. People tend to forget that to teach someone to do something, you have to, well, teach them to do it, before you assess whether or not they can do it. The first phase is shared reading, which is fancy talk for teacher reads it out loud and you follow along (or, in this case, read along out loud when you feel comfortable). We expect errors and miscues during this phase. The thing we like to see is kids correcting themselves on miscues because “that word didn’t sound right”.
We then move into less supported reading – small group and pair reading, and read-to-others. By the time we’re at the read-to-others step, obviously the student is the only one producing spoken language from the text.
Now you’ll ask: aren’t they just memorizing the text? That’s why we did the assessment we did – giving them the unrelated text containing the same characters, and without the clues like pictures or an introduction. That proved that the progression of exercises we’d used was actually getting the kids able to recognize those characters in other places (though you’ll notice we did NOT test the characters in isolation, since that is a parlor trick, not reading.)
I didn’t put comprehension in quotation marks. I put reading in quotation marks. I don’t doubt the comprehension. I doubt the fact that some claim to test reading comprehension when they are testing listening comprehension supported by text. Your post did answer my question though and again I agree. The tone of starting your post was a little strange though and I would never have considered the question of memorizing the text. Even if I did the answer I would have expected was young kids memorize stories their parents read to them and then they “read” the stories by relaying the story based on pictures which is memorization. When they start recognizing some words, they can read the text based on the fact that they know what is on the paper. That supports Krashen’s idea, doesn’t it.
We actually had Chinese teachers listen to the whole presentation on these results and then say, “Yeah, my daughter used to like to pretend she could read familiar stories too, back when she was 4 or so.” 
If it was anyone else but you IL, I would have questioned the veracity of the claims. Astonishing trial.
You should have seen our faces last year on the first day. We thought the kids would manage to stumble through maybe 5 pages. They whipped through everything we had ready for that day and everything for the next day, too. Then we were out of stuff for them to read (we were up until midnight every night trying to get illustrations for the text done and make the Powerpoint and all that) and we still had like 15 minutes left in the 50 minute class period. So we started writing questions up on the board in characters for them to answer. They did that, too. Their exit task that day was to read a question in characters off the board (one of 4) and answer it based on what they’d read in the story that day.
We still want to work to refine this and try to figure out what is the optimal balance (how much language before a chunk of reading, which types of reading help the most, would several small “equivalent” stories be as good as or better than one longer one (as much exploitation of the language with less boredom? or is the predictibility and comfort of repetition important?), would some character study separately be better? if so what kind and how much). Many programs in the US “need” to show “character work” – at the very least, it looks great on the walls and photographs well, and those things are in fact important to a program getting continued funding or support in many cases. (Every year at STARTALK, TPRS class shows up in the “highlights reel” for about 5 seconds, while there’s all sorts of footage of the wall posters and kids manipulating character cards and so forth. And we agree on reflection that the wall posters didn’t do much, if anything, for their literacy. The acquisition things we do just don’t look exciting, but they seem to be working, which is what I care about. TV puts on 10 pounds anyway. )
But for me it was really revealing to see how much I’d been relying on “conventional wisdom” about how reading “had to” be taught in Mandarin. I don’t see myself going back to separate character study until the higher levels, if I have the choice. I really believe that the more language I can get into their heads (for fluent, automatic use) in the first year, the more likely they will continue with Chinese and become really proficient, and the easier it will be for them to learn the “details” that formal, academic Chinese study (=linguistics) requires.
Well, based on their success rate of teaching Chinese to foreigners who actually live in a country where the main language of interaction is Chinese and comparing that to Asians living abroad to learn English, I would suggest they stop “like to pretend to be teachers” and learn how to do something that works.
Nobody has a good word to say about Taiwan’s Chinese teaching system or Taiwan’s teachers (both of which I have zero problem with), pointing to lack of success among foreigners as proof that they’re useless. I think this is BS. I’ve yet to see anyone say anything about the other side of the equation, the students. The simple fact is a very sizable proportion of Western students here apparently lack the time or inclination to put in the effort required to master something as difficult and time-intensive as Chinese. At any given level its not hard to see how puts in the effort outside of class and who doesn’t. According to one of my teachers, at the higher levels they have students that can speak like a Taiwanese, and they have students that are hopeless, it comes down to the individual’s motivation and the effort they put in. Instead of blaming the system (some of my Chinese teachers have have been exceptional, absolutely fantastic teachers), I’d be more inclined to look at the students themselves. If you skip classes and don’t do homework because you have to work, well thats too bad, but you can hardly complain when you’ve been studying for a long time and still can’t speak good Chinese.
I don’t know that it’s necessary to be as hard on the system as the previous poster was, but it is a fact that language is a natural human ability, and it is another fact that even outside of Taiwan, within a university setting where people are a) paying very big money for their classes and b) very motivated to succeed, the vast majority of people who begin Chinese never become proficient. So, yes, I think “conventional wisdom” about teaching Chinese has a lot to do with it, just as “conventional wisdom” about teaching all languages does.
I get a lot of students who have made their best effort with the Taiwanese system (or, you could equally well say, “traditional instruction”) and failed. It’s not that they didn’t try, or they weren’t putting in effort. They simply weren’t getting what they needed to succeed.
Nothing like asking one of the teachers what the problem is…naturally they’re going to blame the students. It’s tradition in faculty rooms around the world. It was not until I switched to comprehensible input-based instruction that I realized it. The “traditional” teachers spend all their time complaining about how the students don’t work. The CI teachers spend all their time boring each other with what their students said in class that day. The difference is that the CI-based teacher believes that if the student does not acquire language, it is because the brain did not get the input it needs, not because the student didn’t “review enough” or “put in enough effort”.
I wasn’t aiming to make any negative comments to the previous poster, my “If you skip classes…” comment wasn’t aimed at him at all, just a general statement. Its human nature teachers will blame the students, and the students will blame the teachers. I can only go on my own personal observations, where the teachers do their best to help you as much as possible, and there is a direct correlation between effort and results. I also strongly believe different people will learn in different ways, and not everybody suits the Taiwan method. I’ve had lazy classmates that have good speaking ability purely because they’ll hang out with their buddies every night (they can’t write for nuts though), while myself and others I’ve met find that unless we write something down a dozen times we just can’t get it to stick. If you’re putting in the hours but still having trouble, I would guess that its not a innate ability problem, but that maybe you need to explore new methods that suit you better. But in my (admittedly severely limited compared to you) experience, the majority of those who fall behind do so because they don’t put in the work. Due to my profession I alway approach thing from an analytical perspective, try to find what works best, is there a better way of doing something, and what others do to succeed. I follow your posts with interest, but when it comes to Chinese, I’ve just concluded that it’s damn difficult, it requires a very long time to get good at it, and there’s no real shortcuts.
One other thing I should add is that failure to succeed often appears to be a practical question of time. Many, if not most, can’t afford to spend a couple of years in Taiwan doing nothing but studying Chinese, and therefore just don’t have enough time to finish what they started. Its not necessarily a reflection of the system, just the reality that it takes time to get good at something difficult. The problem I have is that many people’s comments seem to have an undercurrent of “In the West we’re so advanced, in Taiwan everyone is so backwards”, which IMO unfairly blames Taiwan for shortcomings. If students in China were kicking ass compared to here maybe they would have a point, but I can’t really see any differences. I can only go off my own levels of progress, and due in no small part to having been backed by my teachers every single step of the way, I think I’m doing ok. Still a looooong way to go, but it’s hard; it takes time.
No one said you were. I said maybe it wasn’t necessary to be as hard on the system as he was.
Why? It doesn’t sound as though you’ve tried any other methods; just concluded that the Taiwan method “isn’t for everyone” but if you work hard you can make it work. But then you say some people should try other methods. In the traditional approach to teaching Chinese, the onus is on the student, and yes, they will fall seriously behind if they don’t work. But there are also many, many students who still fall seriously behind despite the fact that they are working very hard. It’s damn difficult the way it has been traditionally taught, but there’s no reason why any language in the world should be damn difficult.
People do learn in different ways – learn information. Language is not about learning information. It’s about acquiring what is a natural human ability. Everyone has already acquired at least one language without any effort at all. The only things preventing them from doing it again with Chinese are tradition and lack of input.
I’m not comparing results in Taiwan with results in China, or even results in the US. I’m comparing results using the traditional means of teaching Chinese with results obtained using experimental means. Now, it happens to be a coincidence, I suppose, that most “outside the box” experimentation seems to go on in the West, not in Taiwan.
Chinese is easy. Much easier for a native speaker of English to acquire to a useful degree than Spanish or French – no verb conjugations, no plurals, no gender. Line the words up and say them. If you’re talking about getting literate and eloquent to a native level, that is more complicated – but if you have the foundation of acquisition at the beginning levels, it’s only about extensive reading and listening. There is no reason in the world why someone who’s had around 200 hours of Chinese shouldn’t be functionally able to use the language. And we’re now finding that reading is a lot easier than we’d thought before, too. But the major result we’re seeing is that to make language easy or to make reading easy, there’s one enormous prerequisite – the language has to be acquired, not memorized. It’s just that simple. I’d love for you to see CI-based Chinese instruction and compare it to your own experience, especially in terms of how many hours outside of class are required to “get it”. Unfortunately, as you might expect, CI is a tough sell in the Chinese teaching community, where we’re bucking 5,000 years of tradition.
I just typed out a detailed reply and lost the lot thanks to this crappy bulletin board that decided even though I was logged on, I had to log in again and lost everything. Well, I ain’t doing that again. I’ll just say if your way is truly a dramatic improvement I hope it takes hold.