[quote=“juvenilemania”]Sorry - just have to collect myself after that blasting from Jive Turkey…
(ego?)[/quote]
I apologize for the rough treatment. I just get a little irritated when it seems like students are buying into the same philosophy that most Chinese teachers spout off.
Me hot shit? I don’t think I said that. At best, I’m just luke warm shit.
The problem with most Chinese teachers in Taiwan and China is much more fundamental than just the techniques or methods they use in the classroom. As a teacher, before you can even look at methodology, you have to commit yourself to a few important teaching habits.
The most important habit would probably be reflective teaching and observation. Teachers in Taiwan and the mainland just don’t do it. Even though they see students falling flat on their faces day after day, they never really take that as a cue that they should adjust their teaching style. Any decent teacher will consider after a lesson how the lesson could have gone better and what went well. He might even make a note of it. The next time around he’ll try to adjust his techniques or materials.
Another important teaching habit is goal setting. A teacher should set goals for what his students should be able to do and for how he’s going to improve his teaching. When a teacher gets a new batch of students for a semester, he should set clear goals for what that group of students will be able to do by the end of the term. Even if the teacher taught the same class or subject in previous semesters, he should be adjusting his semester goals to fit every new batch of students. He should also be setting goals before every lesson. For most teachers, they just march through a dialogue or picture story book and try to get as far as they can in every lesson. That is a completely half-ass, text-centered way of doing it. Goals should not be TB based, but skills and language content based. You teach the students, not the book. A decent teacher will know when to throw the book away; he’ll also be in the habit of setting realistic goals for every activitiy, lesson and semester he teaches. After he’s taught, he’ll stop to think about how he achieved or didn’t achieve his goals. If he’s in the habit of doing this, he won’t need to write anything down. It just becomes second nature.
As I see it, these two habits (reflective teaching and goal setting) are two of the most fundamental habits for a professional teacher. I’ve known people who’ve had no formal teacher training but were pretty good teachers because they were willing to reflect and set goals. If you stick to these habits, then methodology can be learned on the side from books or other teachers. I’ve also known people who just plain weren’t willing to reflect on the quality of their lessons or teach according to goals. If you aren’t willing to do these two things, then no amount of theory about language acquisition or training in methodology is going to make you a good teacher. I know plenty of people who’ve done MAs but were still poor teachers because they just didn’t observe or think about how well students digested their lessons. Since they never really recognize the problems in their own teaching, they will never be able to set realistic goals. The next time you are sitting in a Chinese class, observe the teacher and think about whether or not he/she seems to have clear goals in mind for each task, lesson or semester. If you can’t identify the goal or pupose of what you are doing in class, then I think it’s a safe bet that the teacher can’t either.
OK, enough of the general teaching school platitudes. For teaching Chinese, I think teachers should at least adhere to a couple of principles:
- Teach meaning and spoken form first, then move on to pinyin and characters. Teachers should not be teaching vocabulary or grammar out of the book. That’t not really teaching since a student can learn that way on his own. Learning straight out of a book is just plain boring. Everything is kept within the context of the printed word rather than put in something that resembles the real life context where that bit of language will be encountered. If I were teaching vocabulary, I would use flashcards or props to try to elicit the target words. If they don’t know, then I’d tell them and drill the pronunciation. They still haven’t seen anything in pinyin or characters. They don’t need to yet. After thoroughly drilling the pronunciation, I’d get them into a controlled practice activity using the target vocabulary. This would be an activity where they are interacting with other students instead of with the teacher, but the setup of the activity is restricted in a way that they won’t be able to make too many mistakes. After that, I’d sit them down and cover the written form. If they were beginners, that would only be the pinyin form. I would not spend a week or so at the start of a beginners Chinese course drilling pinyin in a vacuum. I’d teach it to them with useful vocabulary. I say this because seeing the written form first before learning any meaningful words usually just leads to more confusion. There are letters in pinyin that represent sounds that are not in many of our languages, or are represented in different ways. Pinyin can confuse as much as clarify. That’s why I think it’s best to learn the sounds first, and then a few minutes later show them how it is spelled in pinyin. Once you’ve gotten students into that routine, you can stop telling them the pinyin for any words you’ve just taught and just ask them to guess it. Then you just correct their mistakes. I’ve seen teachers do it this way here in HK; it is much more effective than the traditional way of doing it. After you’ve introduced the new language bits, drilled them, given them some controlled practice and introduced and perhaps practiced the written form, then you might move on to some sort of more authentic language activity, but the length and depth of that will obviously be restricted by students’ abilities.
2.Don’t just teach language; teach language skills. A second language student doesn’t just need to learn vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. He also needs to learn a few “strategic” skills. These are things like how to read or listen for jist, how to read or listen for detail, and how to recognize relationships between words or structures that have similar components. These are all skills that we’ve learned and used in our first language. Unfortunately, these are things that we all seem to just turn off when we move to another language. When I see a newspaper article in English, the first thing I do is scan it so I can decide if I want to read it for detail. If it is something I’m intersted in, I’ll read more thoroughly. When I read it for detail, I usually just skip the words I don’t know and subconciously guess their meaning from the overall context. I don’t get bogged down by the meaning of individual words or sentences. When I read Chinese, though, I have to force myself to read “naturally.” If I don’t, I will waste too much time on words and sentences and then not get the meaning of the overall article. These are skills. It is very difficult to develop these “extensive” and “intensive” reading and listening skills in a second language if a teacher is not forcing you to do so with well designed reading or listening activities. What kind of activities would those be? Well, I think any reading activity should be ordered as follows:
a.) a short prediction or lead in activity based on a title or picture.
b.) a couple of scan or skim questions that will make students look for just the overall jist of the text. The teacher should set time limits for finding the answer so students don’t read for detail.
c.) questions that will require students to read for detail. They’d read a second time (after scanning or skimming) to find the answers. These questions could be content oriented or they could be questions that ask them to focus on a certain kind of structure or style in the text.
d.) perhaps a few discussion questions so students can use some of the language in the article in conversation.
All of these things could be done for listening tasks, too. Unfortunately, most teachers of Chinese think that the role of the teacher is to just pass on knowledge. In the case of a reading task, their way of thinking is usally that they should just read through the whole text with the student and explain it line by line. You tell me: do you think that works? Will the student become a good reader?
I’ll try to come back to this later. My wife is coming back from DG today and if I don’t clean the apartment I’ll be in the doghouse all weekend.