Using Chinese in the classroom

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
21

OK, I see a lot of people trying to relate their classroom experiences to how they like their Mandarin classes to be taught. But seriously, for older kids I think the situation is quite different.

We choose to learn Mandarin voluntarily, and when we learn it it is - 90% of the time - the ONLY thing we are learning. Sure, we also have a job but it doesn’t come close to the kind of pressure the Taiwanese educational system puts on these kids.

I know I am stating the obvious, but these kids study English as just one of many other subjects. Additionally, they go to cram school for most of their primary curriculum subjects. When these kids come to cram school (and maybe to a lesser degree to elementary school) their minds are exhausted because they have been learning since god knows what hour in the morning. Couple this with pressure of monthly tests and the pressure of qualifying for the best school and you have a tired mind that never gets a break.

The point I am making is that their minds are so fatigued that they will often have great difficulty listening through everything you say in order to find words that have some kind of meaning to them. Sure, English is still the general rule, but a little Chinese can help because some English words or phrases are damn hard to understand if only explained in English. I mean, how many kids actually admit to a lack of understanding. Even if the all say, “Yes, I understand”, I doubt that all of them do. They are too afraid of saying, “No” because they will lose face.

So, some Chinese is an absolute necessity with hard to explain English, especially given the amount of material that some schools try to cram into their lessons. Have you ever tried to explain things like “Even if…” using only English without sacrificing valuable class time (takes 3 minutes in English if you are lucky, but 10 seconds in Chinese).

For the little tots, though it’s different. Although they have nowhere near the same kind of pressure, they need some Chinese to help break the proverbial ice that covers the slippery slope to learning English. But, thats about it, and after a few months their minds can cope with things and English takes over in the way things are taught. That’s my opinion, anyway…

22

“Even if it rains, we wills till go to the beach” and a few other examples should nail it pretty quick :slight_smile:

[quote]
For the little tots, though it’s different. Although they have nowhere near the same kind of pressure, they need some Chinese to help break the proverbial ice that covers the slippery slope to learning English. But, thats about it, and after a few months their minds can cope with things and English takes over in the way things are taught. That’s my opinion, anyway…[/quote]

I completely agree, and kids is where most of my experience lies.

I used to use a fair bit of Chinese when teahcing twice-a-week kids buxiban, but for everyday students I really think it’s better to use next to no Chinese.

Brian

23

As I said, absolute beginners. Not many 2-1/2 and 3-year-olds have experience being immersed, let alone exposed to another language, even here. Add on top of that being away from your family for the first time and put into the care of someone who doesn’t look like you and doesn’t speak your language…I can’t imagine how traumatic it can be a small child. I find that using, even just a little bit of their language to clarify what you want them to do (if coupled with English so that they are also hearing what you said to them in English), goes a long way in helping them adjust to such a difficult time.

Bu Lai En, I see where you are coming from when you say they understand there are two languages, but from my own experiences, many of my kids who either had parents speaking both languages to them at random times :fume: or had grown up where there was no boundary on language, tended to be confused about where one language was separate from the other. A child doesn’t necessarily know that there are two distinct languages, but rather two sets of lexicons…kind of like calling that flat black thing that you use to fry food either a skillet or a frying pan. It’s two names for the same thing. When parents use both languages at home without any boundaries (such as Dad speaks to them in only English while Mom speaks to them in only Chinese), they tend to be confused that there are in fact two distinct languages. I have also found that my bilingual and trilingual (and quadrilingual to a degree in one case) preschoolers have a harder time speaking just one language at a time

24

When I teach kids this age, they don’t seem to even consider for a second that I’m not understanding all the Chinese they’re saying. Why would this even occur to them? In fact, I let them speak as much Chinese as they like and respond to their Chinese questions. The fact that I respond in English doesn’t seem to phase them at all. I don’t think I’ve ever used Chinese with baby clases. Remember they probably don’t understand 9/10ths the Chinese they hear either. They’re quite used to not understanding. They pick up most of the meaning through tone, body language, context etc.

Brian

25

This is a bit unrelated to what you guys are on about just now but I think it may be fairly interesting nonetheless. See if you agree…

If you teach small groups of adults you are definitely making a mistake if you fail to prepare them for experiences that they are actually going to have. For example if your student is going to Carnagies tomorow night you might want to teach “O.K.” and “But I thought it was the man’s responsibility to bring the condom,” etc. If they are not planning on going to Carnagies or anywhere else for that matter but instead plan on sitting around at home every night then the best thing you can do is encourage them to chat at tealit or, my favorite, watch English television shows. If you think about it seriously for a moment I think you will have to agree that the single most reliable, informative, entertaining source of English in these people’s lives is their television. It is not the only source but it is always available, it is free and it provides an extraordinarily rich context from which to learn English naturaly.

O.K. so lets say you agree that many people here would be well advised to use their television (especially DVD) to learn English. What next? I would say that the next thing is for them to become very good students of vocabulary, and this certainly does not mean learning only the most basic sense of each word. Let me use “catch” again as an example. Perhaps your student hasn’t come across this word for a while so throwing him a ball and saying “catch” is a great way to refresh his memory. Or maybe he has never seen that word before. Who knows? One thing you can be sure of is that you have no way of knowing in advance what your students do or do not know. And you also have no way of knowing what language they will see next in the real world. Anyway, so now you have introduced the word catch in it’s most basic meaning but it occurs to you that this might not be much help the next time he comes across “catch a cold” “catch a break” or even “catch shit from the old lady.” If you are some sort of genius you might be able to think of some quick way to illustrate all of these senses of “catch.” For the rest of us mortals it might be better to say something like “catch is also used metaphorically in a number of expressions such as these in your dictionairy,” at which point you find the most common usages and the best examples and read the example sentences and definitions aloud once in English and once in Chinese. Send them home with instructions to review the relevant pages in the dictionary, check their voacb list and bob’s your uncle you’ve gone a long way toward making them better all around language learners. Language learners that might have a hope in hell of figuring out things for themselves some day.

26

[quote=“Bu Lai En”][quote]

When I teach kids this age, they don’t seem to even consider for a second that I’m not understanding all the Chinese they’re saying. Why would this even occur to them? In fact, I let them speak as much Chinese as they like and respond to their Chinese questions. The fact that I respond in English doesn’t seem to phase them at all. I don’t think I’ve ever used Chinese with baby clases. Remember they probably don’t understand 9/10ths the Chinese they hear either. They’re quite used to not understanding. They pick up most of the meaning through tone, body language, context etc.

Brian[/quote]

Nice post. I never looked at it that way before. But then I have never taught kids either. :blush:

27

Lately I’ve been wondering whether their mother tongue might help learners with target-language word order and maybe other issues in syntax. I can’t imagine that nobody’s done anything on that, but I’m not very well-read in our field.

I’ve noticed that in those few cases where I seem to have gotten the right word order of a given grammatical situation in a target language, I’ve also learned that word order in English. I wonder whether maybe I somehow learned the word order in English first, before I learned it in the target language, or at least simultaneously with it. So I wonder whether learning target-language word order in their mother tongue might help learners with target-language word-order issues. I also wonder whether other problems of syntax, and even how syntax relates to meaning, can be helped along by the use of the learners’ mother tongue.

And when I say I’m wondering, I mean I’m really wondering; I don’t claim to have any degree of certitude about it.

28

I usually just skim through the teacher’s book, but I noticed that the curriculum I’m using now has parts where it says to explain something using L1 (1st language). The last curriculum I used also had big sections where it’d say I should explain something in L1 (so I did).

Both were kindergarten.

29

I know someone who teaches in Chinese for 90% of the time.

30

I am not certain that this relates exactly to what you are saying Xp+10k but recently I have been attempting to isolate the real problem areas with my Chinese and then looking those things up in Chinese grammar text books. The grammar explanations don’t entirely suit my learning style (too stupid probably) but I do find it extremely useful to simply record, in English, example sentences using, for example, participle adjectives. I then repeat the Chinese translation of those phrases. I find that after I have listened to the tape again a number of times the Chinese patterns start making sense. I think that if you are looking for exact equivalents though you may often be disappointed. Participle adjective perhaps make a nice case in point.

31

Yeah, bob, I think you’re talking about basically the same thing I was talking about. One reason I would want to experiment with the learners saying it in their own language but with English word order, regardless of whether the meaning jibes, is related to the very idea that it sounds weird to say it that way in one’s own language. For one thing, I figure, it’s weird enough for the learner to have to attach meanings to all these strange sounds; it might be a bit much to expect them to accommodate the sounds and the word order at the same time. So try the L2 word order in L1, even if it sounds strange to them. Sort of a “one weird thing at a time” hypothesis.

For me, though, the whole thing’s probably going to be moot for some time, since I’m doing very little teaching. I’m “editing” a “dictionary.” :frowning: Also, my Chinese is very poor. But actually, good Chinese might not be required in this case since I’d actually be shooting for something close to word-for-word translations. The idea would be not so much coherence as getting them accustomed to the word order, and whatever other grammatical features they might be having problems with, using the sounds of their own language.

Maybe this is just a little “hobby horse” of mine, and anyway, maybe it can’t really be done. But I noticed when I was teaching an all-day kindy class that even immersed kids have problems with word order and other syntax issues.

On another note, I also agree with what ImaniOU said, that very young learners may be flipped out by the whole school scene, so it would be nice to be able to speak to them in their own language. Also, I think safety issues should be addressed in Chinese. I’ve been at bushibans and similar schools, though, and so far, they’ve frowned on me trying my hand at speaking to the kids in Chinese.

In any case, it’s nice to know, though, like Bu Lai En said, that the really young ones don’t even know that much Chinese, which might go a little way toward leveling the playing field, for my sake. :laughing:

32

I used to teach two-year-olds. The first day one of them said to me (in Chinese) “I can count,” and then he counted up to five in English. My Taiwanese boss came running over screaming and scolded him for speaking in Chinese, and gave him a lecture (in Chinese) about how everyone must work hard and only speak English. He never spoke a word to me again.
Very young children learn languages naturally; you don’t need to “teach” them, and you certainly don’t need to give them explanations in their native language.

For older students, I’ve found that when you start speaking Chinese to give grammar explanations, the class quickly degenerates into an all-Chinese waste of time. Oddly, the students often don’t think it’s a waste of time, because they are used to “English” classes that are 95% Chinese from their school days, but clearly they’d be better off listening to and dealing with English.

33

Sorry XP+10k I don’t think my brain is working today. I got you now. What you are suggesting is something most of have done when learning a second language. Anyway I know I did.

bababa - I set one rule and then let them speak all the Mandarin they want. Anything that is spoken in Mandarin has to be translated into English. If you do that you give them a chance to say what they can in English as well as a chance to learn how to say the things they want to be able to say. The rule applies to the teacher too so if you are having trouble getting them to understand your English you can just switch to Mandarin and then translate whatever you said back into English. Pronounce the English version slowly a couple of times with the tape recorder on and they can go home and listen to the tape a few times. I frequently find that the next time I say something similar in English they get it. In other words, they learned something.