Considering applying for short term Mandarin courses in CLC, Kainan University. From the little i know, the sort term programs are handled through TLI. Would appreciate if there those whom may be able to share their experience enrolled in this center. I’ve also heard that visa extensions might be a problem for TLI facilitated courses in CLC. Thanks.
I know this thread is quite aged already, but for others who are looking for some testimonial for decision making, here are my two cents about the Chinese Language Center at Kainan University in Taoyuan.
From the little i know, the sort term programs are handled through TLI.
I took a short term (3M) course with a dozen of students and it was handled on campus by the CLC itself - not by TLI. However I have to say I was very disappointed. Not only is the university as a whole pretty run down and very rurally located.
The signup procedure of the CLC however is quite flexible, because you can join the course anytime you want. However this flexibility has some downsight: you regularly get new classmates and also the teachers can change during the course.
The following information only counts for my course. I heard other teachers perform slightly better:
During the class, we mainly (80%) had the teacher speaking. Which would be okay for your listening practise, but the teacher spoke very fast and used words, which have been totally new for all of us, without even explaining them. But on top of that, the teacher explained vocabulary we learned just few lessons ago - wasting time. There was no homework and exercises in class were limited to writing the grammar sentences in the course book which all got corrected during class. The little speaking exercises were usually already answered by the teacher, before you can come up with your own answer. So in total, the teacher style IMHO was very ineffective, because you either listen to the teacher, who you barely understand or wait for others to get their sentences corrected.
Kainan University has mainly students from Japan and Vietnam. Therefore my class was 90% Vietnamese. As the teacher wasn’t able to speak English at all, grammar and new vocabulary was limited to explain in Chinese only. So, you have to be prepared to study a lot by yourself. I was surprised at the beginning, but in the end I could understand, why the majority of the class was coming late every day by 10-20 mins and played their phone during class - because the class is boring and you don’t learn much.
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I did a 3-month course at Kainan back in 2009, and the above experience pretty much mirrors my own…take that as you will.
In my later course at Tzu Chi in Hualian, the majority of the students were from several non-English speaking countries and I loved it. I think that’s the best scenario for me because we were forced to speak Chinese with each other outside of class as well.
Our teacher only used Chinese in class, even to explain vocabulary and grammar, but she would use English if students really didn’t understand, but usually only during break time or after class. I myself appreciated this method–though challenging–but there were a couple of students who were frustrated by it.
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What exactly did you experience?
I actually didn’t intent to do any judgement in my post about only having non-english speaking students in class nor teaching only using Chinese. It was just a description of the environment. In fact, I totally think that this setting is useful too, because it gives you the opportunity to speak and practice more.
However, my point is, if you have a teacher, never learned any foreign language before, in most cases that person doesn’t know how to teach a foreign language either. In my case, if you only get exposed to words, you don’t understand (because the teacher disrespects what has been learned before), there is no way to improve your listening skills, if you are not willing to invest more time on self-studying. Furthermore in a more advanced class, it gets more and more difficult to explain minor differences in vocabulary. Having a teacher able to speak English or at least use more effective ways (by using simple sentences / examples) in Chinese to explain, makes it easier to understand.
My takeaway is, it really matters, what kind of teacher you have.