[quote=“Hellstorm”]
I』m always quite disappointed that there is so much beginner stuff, but no advanced level books. This is really a problem. [/quote]
And when you do find advanced-level books, they don’t employ creative methods; they’re just methodological copies of elementary texts.
The advanced student doesn’t really need a text, though. The internet has an inexhaustible amount of reading/listening material. And if you live in Taiwan, there’s the cultural-linguistic environment itself. (I like radio programs.) These resources take a bit more work, however.
Here’s a post I started awhile ago with on-line reading resources;
[quote=“archylgp”]
And when you do find advanced-level books, they don’t employ creative methods; they’re just methodological copies of elementary texts.
The advanced student doesn’t really need a text, though. The internet has an inexhaustible amount of reading/listening material. And if you live in Taiwan, there’s the cultural-linguistic environment itself. (I like radio programs.) These resources take a bit more work, however. [/quote]
Ok, it depends what level to call “advanced”. Really advanced students may not need a textbook, but still, they also benefit from good teaching material. I’ve got an English textbook for the CPE exam, and it teaches stuff I would never learn for myself, even though I read English texts, watch English movies and sometimes talk in English. Total immersion will not get you to the best level.
Maybe what I called “advanced” would be more like intermediate. These kinds of students who can almost read Chinese texts without having to check every second word, but would like to get more advanced vocabulary presented in a textbook.
After all, English classes in school don’t stop in the third year. But that’s how it is with Chinese: You are expected to learn it by yourself after you have acquired the most basic grammar and vocabulary.
Well, to be fair, that’s pretty much how it is – once you’ve acquired the basic grammar and the highest-frequency vocab, so that you can read independently and ask your way out of trouble when needed, you can expand your language repertoire on your own through extensive reading. Probably the best way to do it – at least for non-complex writing system languages.
Something I’m grappling with in our handling of intermediate students like the ones you describe is the fact that reading for acquisition involves getting the phonetic form of the word into the head and connecting it with the meaning. Meaning, okay, we can get that from context lots of times, especially if it’s a well-written piece of pedagogical reading text. But the phonetic form isn’t obvious from the characters, and putting Romanization next to characters means the characters are invisible to most Westerners (our eyes just go to the Roman alphabet, we can’t help it.)
So it seems from this limited bit of thinking that extensive reading in Romanization, or ideally in clickable text, is the way to go. Although I still haven’t figured out the best way to go about reading with students when “sounding out” the words in the text only slows them down in the reading process. I think we have “reading for information” (do not subvocalize, ignore pronunciations) and “reading for acquisition” (subvocalize or read out loud to yourself, think about the pronunciations) as two separate exercises. Quite different from Spanish where you can acquire a word from context complete with pronunciation.
[quote=“ironlady”]
Something I’m grappling with in our handling of intermediate students like the ones you describe is the fact that reading for acquisition involves getting the phonetic form of the word into the head and connecting it with the meaning. Meaning, okay, we can get that from context lots of times, especially if it’s a well-written piece of pedagogical reading text. But the phonetic form isn’t obvious from the characters, and putting Romanization next to characters means the characters are invisible to most Westerners (our eyes just go to the Roman alphabet, we can’t help it.)
So it seems from this limited bit of thinking that extensive reading in Romanization, or ideally in clickable text, is the way to go. Although I still haven’t figured out the best way to go about reading with students when “sounding out” the words in the text only slows them down in the reading process. I think we have “reading for information” (do not subvocalize, ignore pronunciations) and “reading for acquisition” (subvocalize or read out loud to yourself, think about the pronunciations) as two separate exercises. Quite different from Spanish where you can acquire a word from context complete with pronunciation.[/quote]
In my early days (2nd year university classes), I wouldn’t approach a text without audio. My first step was listening comprehension. I would listen without the text and look up words as I needed. Next was character memorization. I approached step two by listening to the text and then writing out the characters. Step three was pronunciation (reading) practice, which was always done out load. I read the characters out load when learning them (step two). I went through these three steps sentence by sentence. By the time I had finished the texts, I also had it memorized.
After a year of this, I established the link between a character and its pronunciation (tone and segments) such that reading without the “phonetic form” would be strange.
I have a question for you Ironlady. How do you grade pronunciation? My university teachers didn’t asses pronunciation. Every thing was written. I assumed this was because grading pronunciation isn’t easy. I was annoyed by this my first year as all the work I was putting into the tones and troublesome syllables – ji qi xi – didn’t count for anything grade wise.
ironlady - CI seems very much like immersion to me!! I’ve learnt two languages via immersion (I suppose you can say it’s ‘immersion’) and that’s basically how my brain works - you know the basics, and then you deduce the meaning and usage of words/particles etc. you don’t know from the context. Is that right? (That’s my deductions from the posts, but I haven’t combed them through properly yet.) I didn’t know that you could actively teach that.
As for the reading problem… Maybe do a speech section using those words first, and then move onto the reading? Then they already know the rough meaning of the word, and can work out which words the new characters are from the rest of the sentence. No romanization needed, and they work out the characters themselves so they’ll remember them more. Maybe?
[quote=“archylgp”]
I have a question for you Ironlady. How do you grade pronunciation? My university teachers didn’t asses pronunciation. Every thing was written. I assumed this was because grading pronunciation isn’t easy. I was annoyed by this my first year as all the work I was putting into the tones and troublesome syllables – ji qi xi – didn’t count for anything grade wise.[/quote]
I don’t. I’ve never had a student have persistent problems in pronouncing tones or sounds of Mandarin.Foreign accent is most likely going to exist to some degree in most if not students, and it’s not always a bad thing (lots of sociolinguistic stuff could go here, but not right now.) I’m concerned about utilitarian intelligibility, which means pronouncing correct tones (those make an enormous difference, although they are not 100% crucial in correct context, despite what is constantly said) and being fairly accurate on pronunciation of segments but not necessarily to the point where it’s more valuable to take a week and do pronunciation drills (the worst feature of modern Mandarin teaching!) than to use that time to build competence in the language.
Accent can always be adjusted. I totally changed my own accent upon returning to the US from Taiwan. But I was already solidly proficient, if not fluent in a native-like way, so I could focus on the sounds without losing the rest of the language. Beginners can’t do that, so it breaks down their overall language if too much focus is placed on it.
CI is essentially immersion made optimal (which is why I call the CI-based Chinese teaching method “Optimized Immersion”). CI is the way it occurs in nature, but in “captivity” we speed things up to compensate for the relative lack of time. But there is lots more about this already on the board here and in other places…
That’s what we do in Optimized Immersion for Mandarin. The students learn the spoken language first (not all of it, duh…but some of it, and learn that part of it well) before being asked to recognize it as written language. But Romanization is still very useful and, I think, speeds the process. Westerners as a whole get really nervous if there’s no way to write down what the word sounds like. If you don’t give them a sensible system, they’ll make up their own with varying degrees of success. At least giving them a system like TOP or Pinyin ensures that all the elements (tones, sounds not in English) are accounted for. If they make it up themselves, they may not hear those distinctions as clearly or even account for them in their notes.
I don’t. I’ve never had a student have persistent problems in pronouncing tones or sounds of Mandarin.Foreign accent is most likely going to exist to some degree in most if not students, and it’s not always a bad thing (lots of sociolinguistic stuff could go here, but not right now.) I’m concerned about utilitarian intelligibility, which means pronouncing correct tones (those make an enormous difference, although they are not 100% crucial in correct context, despite what is constantly said) and being fairly accurate on pronunciation of segments but not necessarily to the point where it’s more valuable to take a week and do pronunciation drills (the worst feature of modern Mandarin teaching!) than to use that time to build competence in the language.[/quote]
The successes of your students is proof that your method is working. I approached learning pronunciation in a different way and it worked well for me. (I was my best teacher and my best student was me )
I took first-year Chinese over a 2.4 month intensive course, though. I was frustrated because my work in pronunciation was not being recognized numerically, and since I was spending a lot of time working with speaking instead of memorizing characters, my character tests were not perfect. I got a 3.7 (4.0 scale), which is good, but I felt (and still do feel) that I deserved a 4.0. My work was better recognized in 2nd-year Chinese.
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