Will pay someone to send me a Chinese language teaching manual for young toddlers

Taiwan Parenting
1

I need:

  1. (Mandarin) Guide to teaching Chinese as a native language to Chinese/Taiwanese toddlers, such as a guide written to train Chinese/Taiwanese day care teachers, cram school teachers, or speech therapists
  2. (Mandarin) Guide to teaching Chinese as a native language to Chinese/Taiwanese toddlers, such as a guide written to help out Chinese/Taiwanese parents
  3. (Mandarin) Guide to teaching English as a foreign language to Chinese/Taiwanese toddlers (which our nanny wouldn’t follow directly but would use as a baseline for understanding how to teach Chinese to an American toddler).

Does anyone know of anything like this in Chinese? I am horribly slow at reading Chinese, so it is too painful for me to do Internet searches in Chinese myself, but if you are Taiwanese or have a Taiwanese partner willing to do it, I’ll pay a reasonable service fee to someone to find a few good potential books for me, have them delivered to you in Taiwan (or buy them at the store), and then ship them to us in the US.

Background:

We live in the US and have a Taiwanese nanny who has no teaching experience.

We speak English to our 15 month old toddler because that is our native language, even though I speak Mandarin pretty well. There are lots of language theories on this, but without getting into a theoretical discussion, I’m trying to stick to one language with him and only speak to him in English since that’s my native language.

At the same time, we would like him to learn proper Mandarin from a native speaker, so hence the Taiwanese nanny. However, I think she assumes he will just learn Mandarin because her own son learned Mandarin from her. Having taught English in Taiwan myself at one point, I feel like learning language is less magic (“poof I suddenly speak Mandarin”) and more like actively deciphering a puzzle based on all the hints you are given. And I want him to be given lots of hints by his nanny. Unlike her own situation where she was with her own son for 24 hours for most of his childhood, we only have a nanny for a few hours a day so we need a more proactive approach to teaching him Chinese during that limited time.

So far he seems to be progressing in English. We have built up a vocabulary of nouns that he understands (fence, toy, floor, gate, leg, etc), and we have slowly added some verbs, commands and phrases that we use in conjunction with those nouns (don’t touch the fence, drop the toy on the floor, don’t put your leg through the gate, etc). We want him to make the same progress in Chinese.

What I’m doing comes naturally to me based on my English teaching experience in Taiwan. However, I don’t know how to convey this intuition to our nanny in a time effective manner. I don’t exactly want to start writing out daily lesson plans for her. I’m thinking what we need is a language teaching manual for Chinese teachers, similar to what I used to use at Hess, where all I had to do was follow the activities and guidelines for each day. Or any sort of teaching manual would help.

2

Just tell her to speak to the kid in Mandarin at all times.

3

At 15 months, this child will learn English anyway despite your best efforts to “teach him” English. He will acquire it in the same order every other child does, with the same mistakes along the way, no matter how you structure your “curriculum”. (Sorry, but it’s rather silly, really.)

Just have your Mandarin-speaking nanny speak Mandarin to your child in the way she would speak to any 15-month-old child in Taiwan. The brain will do the rest of the work, provided you keep your fingers out of the pie. He will acquire any language for which there is rich input available for him – language with meaning attached to it. There is no curriculum or teaching needed. And yes, I do have a Ph.D in language teaching, just BTW.

4

I have to agree here. A child learns his native language naturally, by his interactions with those around him. You’re teaching him in a sense, but certainly don’t have to do anything special in order for him to learn - just talking to him and interacting with him is all he needs.
Same with the Chinese nanny. All you have to do is insist she speaks Chinese all the time to him, and does not use English - which may be harder than you think, since she is in the States and may be hoping to learn English. But just stress two things: you want her to speak only Chinese to your son, and you want her to play with him and interact with him. Some inexperienced nannies basically plunk the kid down in front of the TV set and don’t actually talk to the child much. If you do want to structure ‘classes’, just have a set of experiences you want her to go through every day or whatever: for example, you want her to have one hour of ‘art class’ (scribbling on paper one day, painting one day - kids that age love to paint, playing with play dough one day, etc.), one hour of physical activity (taking him to the park to play on the playground equipment, taking him swimming, etc.), half an hour of reading (where she reads a Chinese toddler book to him in the same way any parent or nanny would read a book to a child), half an hour of playing with his toys. Don’t make these rigid time blocks - just a suggestion of how she could pass the time with the child while ensuring he gets plenty of interaction from her. He should pick up Chinese from her the same way he is picking up English from you - naturally.
He doesn’t need classes like in a buxiban - one reason kids in a buxiban need classes is because there are many children in one group. Without a structure, they will not get enough interaction with the teacher, and the class may descend into chaos. With only one or two children, just interacting with a native speaker will be enough.

5

Thanks for all of the suggestions. One of our issues is time constrains and immersion. I have no doubt being immersed in Mandarin for 24/7 would achieve the desired result, I am less confident with that approach with limited daytime exposure to a Mandarin speaker, where the interactions are of limited quality.

We’ve instructed her to only speak Mandarin to him. But he clearly is not picking up Mandarin at the same speed. I actually have doubts as to how much Mandarin he understands, if any. Whereas he clearly comprehends some English at this point. So at some point you have to start questioning the “natural” method when it is not producing results.

Most of the materials for parents I’ve seen suggest teaching the child the things in his immediate environment through repeatedly describing what you are doing as you do it. So that’s pretty much what I have done: constantly talk about what we are doing or what he is doing while doing it. Whenever he sees something interesting, I point it out to him and tell him what it’s called. I throw in some verbs so he can hear how to use it in a sentence. That’s what the parenting books suggest and it seems pretty common sense to me.

However, it’s hard to get our nanny to do the same thing in Mandarin. For the average person, it’s not natural to talk to someone who never talks back to you. For a nanny, they see their job as changing diapers and feeding the baby, not talking to a baby who never talks back.

So I thought getting some teaching materials in Chinese would show her the underlying logic behind why she needs to interact with him more. And if there are types of things she is not doing enough of, I could always pull out a particular chapter and show her how to do more in a particular area. Although she would approach it in a much more casual manner (not just following a lesson plan), the idea is that I need something like this to convince her it’s important to have quality linguistic interactions with the child in order for him to learn language. I thought providing her with a roadmap would just make my suggestions to talk to the child more concrete. Otherwise, she thinks saying hello in the morning constitutes talking to the child, whereas my concept of talking to the child is constantly describing what the child is looking at or interested in, etc.

It’s easy to say “all she needs to do is talk to the child”. It’s a whole other thing to actually convince a nanny to actually do that in a concrete way without nagging her to death or standing over her shoulder.

6

Teddoman, I agree with the above posters. Just have your nanny speak to him only in Mandarin. And since that’s only 2 hours a day you could choose one day to speak only Mandarin to him as well.

But you weren’t teaching it to infants or toddlers, right? They just absorb the language of their environment, like magic. Just give them the environment, and “poof”, they will be able to speak it. Not suddenly, of course.

If you want a little structure, take the same books you’re teaching English with (e.g. simple picture books) and just have the nanny go through and teach the same words in Chinese. She can add the Chinese words and bopomofo or pinyin in a corner of each page if you need a reminder or if you want to eventually use those books to teach writing, or you can buy books like that already made.

That’s natural, as he’s getting less time with the Mandarin. You can fix that by spending some time talking to him in Mandarin so he gets more than just nanny’s time.

[quote]However, it’s hard to get our nanny to do the same thing in Mandarin. For the average person, it’s not natural to talk to someone who never talks back to you. For a nanny, they see their job as changing diapers and feeding the baby, not talking to a baby who never talks back…she thinks saying hello in the morning constitutes talking to the child, whereas my concept of talking to the child is constantly describing what the child is looking at or interested in, etc.

It’s easy to say “all she needs to do is talk to the child”. It’s a whole other thing to actually convince a nanny to actually do that in a concrete way without nagging her to death.[/quote]

Well, the problem here isn’t the method, it’s the nanny. We have a 3-month-old at home, and talk to him most of the time, even though he doesn’t talk back to us yet. Find a nanny who is happy to do that in Mandarin, and your problem is solved.

7

We’re really not that structured actually. We just let him show interest in things and then we teach him what it’s called + some verbs or phrases.

We do have picture books, but the nanny doesn’t seem to have any common sense with picture books. When she does deign to try to teach him, she’ll teach him a laundry list of nouns in one sitting, when in reality, we would be very lucky if he could pick up a single noun in an entire day. It’s intuitive to me that repetition at this stage is more valuable than breadth, but she doesn’t seem to share that intuition.

Well because he naps so much, he actually gets about 50/50 exposure. It’s just that we do a lot more quality talking during our time with him.

There are so many considerations involved in hiring a nanny. We might find the perfect person in terms of language interaction who has a horrible attitude towards us. So sometimes you can’t have everything. Plus this is the US, Taiwanese nannies don’t grow on trees. My hope is that a little extra training could improve the quality of her language interactions. I think most reasonable people when they see something in a book, they tend to believe it more. I was just hoping to use a book to convince her, the same way I was convinced reading various parenting books.

8

Your son will get more language acquisition from having the nanny just speak naturally to him during those 2 hours than by structuring those 2 hours. Believe me. It’s not about how many words he knows. It’s about his brain processing complex sentences that he hears and having his brain sort out all the grammar by itself. He can’t do that if all he’s getting are words and pointing to things. Let Nature do the job it already does so well without anyone’s help or interference.

Also, why the huge rush? Life is long. There is time for your son to learn Mandarin later on. Having a start as much as possible now is great, but it’s not going to keep him out of college or put him on the bread lines if he doesn’t get much Mandarin input until the ripe old age of three or four.

9

[quote=“Teddoman”]
We’ve instructed her to only speak Mandarin to him. But he clearly is not picking up Mandarin at the same speed. I actually have doubts as to how much Mandarin he understands, if any. Whereas he clearly comprehends some English at this point. So at some point you have to start questioning the “natural” method when it is not producing results.[/quote]

More like, you have to start questioning the understanding the parent has of the natural method, if he expects it to show results immediately, and expects the order of acquisition and the rate of acquisition to be parallel in two languages with different amounts and types of input. He’s had about 7500 more hours of English input than Mandarin, fer Pete’s sake!

And they criticize the “Tiger Mother”… :aiyo:

10

[quote=“Teddoman”]
We’ve instructed her to only speak Mandarin to him. But he clearly is not picking up Mandarin at the same speed. I actually have doubts as to how much Mandarin he understands, if any. [/quote]When did you get this nanny, though? There was a year or so of English imput before he said anything, I’m sure. So it is natural that his Mandarin will not be as good. I think it is important to stress that what the nanny has to do is interact with him in Mandarin, not try to actively ‘teach’ him words. I would not expect to see much results at first - just like a baby does not speak his native language at first, but clearly gets better and better each day at understanding.

[quote]
Most of the materials for parents I’ve seen suggest teaching the child the things in his immediate environment through repeatedly describing what you are doing as you do it. So that’s pretty much what I have done: constantly talk about what we are doing or what he is doing while doing it. Whenever he sees something interesting, I point it out to him and tell him what it’s called. I throw in some verbs so he can hear how to use it in a sentence. That’s what the parenting books suggest and it seems pretty common sense to me.[/quote]Yes, this is what parenting books typically suggest, and it is also what parents typically do naturally with children; though not everyone does. I had one friend who thought it was very strange to hear me talking to her baby when the baby could not respond.

[quote]
However, it’s hard to get our nanny to do the same thing in Mandarin. For the average person, it’s not natural to talk to someone who never talks back to you. [/quote]As above. It is a natural way for parents to interact with a child; the books are just explaining what research has shown to be the natural process.
What you really need is a nanny who just naturally interacts with babies by talking to them.

[quote]
For a nanny, they see their job as changing diapers and feeding the baby, not talking to a baby who never talks back.[/quote]I agree with an earlier poster who said the problem is the nanny, then. There are plenty of people who naturally talk to babies in the appropriate way - that’s how the researches did the research cited in the baby books you have mentioned - they compared the rate of progress, the IQ levels, etc., of babies raised by parents using different parenting styles, and recommend the parenting style where the parents talk to and interact with the child a lot. Even without this optimal style, a child will still learn its native language; I agree without this optimal style, a couple of hours a day with a nanny may not work.
I once worked as a nanny, and I certainly did not see my job as just changing diapers and feeding - I thought that my job was to do all I could (based on what I knew about psychology and child-rearing) to provide the optimum environment for the child to develope intellectually, artistically, musically, and physically.

[quote]
So I thought getting some teaching materials in Chinese would show her the underlying logic behind why she needs to interact with him more. And if there are types of things she is not doing enough of, I could always pull out a particular chapter and show her how to do more in a particular area. Although she would approach it in a much more casual manner (not just following a lesson plan), the idea is that I need something like this to convince her it’s important to have quality linguistic interactions with the child in order for him to learn language. I thought providing her with a roadmap would just make my suggestions to talk to the child more concrete. Otherwise, she thinks saying hello in the morning constitutes talking to the child, whereas my concept of talking to the child is constantly describing what the child is looking at or interested in, etc.[/quote]I would worry that since she is clueless about teaching in general, she might take your suggestions to mean you really want her to teach the language, and that won’t work at that age. Just try to stress that you want her to interact with the child. Maybe stay with her for a few days and model how you talk to the baby, and she’ll catch on. As the child learns more Mandarin, he will start reacting to what she is saying. And stress that what you want her for as a nanny is really to help your child learn Mandarin.

If you live in a city with a large immigrant population of Chinese-speakers, your local health department or whatever department is in charge of early-childhood health and development may have brochures in Chinese explaining the best way to interact with a baby. I know I have seen public service announcements giving tips like this on Detroit TV stations.

11

Don’t want to be rude but you come across as kind of pushy and overbearing.

Unless you specifically employed the nanny as a teacher/nanny then i think you shouldn’t be so concerned with telling her how to teach - it’s not her job.
It’s a lot of pressure with some overbearing parent constantly checking if the kid is speaking another language when you just wanted a ‘simple’ nanny job.

Of course she’s your employee so i guess you think you can do whatever you want (i don’t agree). I think it’s a dick move to expect anything more than nannying.

It’s great you want to give your kid an advantage by speaking two languages and all but just take a step back and look from another perspective.

It’s a bonus not a right that your kid will pick up some language from the nanny. The kid probably sleeps when she is about anyway amirite?

Just my thoughts.

12

Or secondly pay for the nanny to do a TEFL course (pay her for the time she spends at class of course).

Employ her as teacher for your kid (with teaching pay rates of course). It will be more effective for her not to be doing nannying while teaching so book in some lessons when your kid has free time.

Have a regular testing period of your kids abilities to ensure sure she is being effective too.

13

[quote=“Askr”]Or secondly pay for the nanny to do a TEFL course (pay her for the time she spends at class of course).

Employ her as teacher for your kid (with teaching pay rates of course). It will be more effective for her not to be doing nannying while teaching so book in some lessons when your kid has free time.

Have a regular testing period of your kids abilities to ensure sure she is being effective too.[/quote]

This is traditional thinking about how to “teach” languages. It doesn’t work with adults, and it doesn’t work with kids, either. It definitely doesn’t work with children who are under 2 years old!! Just let Nature do what it is set up to do. If anything, just mention now and then that you want the nanny to speak Mandarin with the child as she would speak Mandarin with any 15-month-old child in Taiwan.

I would also think about just how anxious you are for this kid to speak Mandarin. What else will you be pushing, pushing, pushing about? Take a step back and think about what you want your child to remember from his childhood. I’ll bet you wouldn’t want his first memories to be Daddy yelling because he couldn’t speak Mandarin, or because he hadn’t gotten his brown belt in taikwondo before he was 5.

14

I think many people here think they are disagreeing with me, because I am showing too much interest in having my baby learn a 2nd language.

But from the content of what is being said to me, I think we are much closer in thinking than you believe.

I feel like I’m being turned into a bit of a strawman here- the stilted sentence speaking tiger dad who barks out only nouns and ends up with a wild-haired pale child who learns no grammar while being forced to sit and study a textbook of images as an infant; meanwhile, he terrorizes the household staff by threatening them anytime a speck of dust appears on the furniture and won’t let the nanny play with the baby. Those evil tiger dads! Why can’t they just let their kids and nannies have fun! :slight_smile:

I hope I didn’t ever suggest that all I did was throw random words in the air and point at things. It would take a monumental feat of effort to deprive myself of my own language skills, my own language teaching experience, and every piece of language acquisition and parenting reading I have ever done, to start behaving in a way that is out of conformance with natural language. I may have summarized too briefly, but I hope I wasn’t giving the impression that I don’t use grammar. Clearly, one has to hear grammar to learn grammar.

Again, I hope no one has the impression that I am against learning grammar. I am not sure where this impression ever arose, excepts perhaps my too-brief description of my interactions. I was just trying to briefly characterize the nature of our interactions, which typically revolve around his daily life activities and things that he shows interest in. These are the things we talk to him about and describe. “Did you pee? Is your diaper wet? Let’s take a look and see if your diaper is wet. Can I open your diaper and take a peek? Oh, look, your diaper is wet. I guess it’s time to change your diaper. Can I lay you down on the bed?” etc etc etc. Daily activities discussion, all involving the use of normal sentences. That’s what all the parenting books say so that’s what we did.

However, even for me as the parent, I had to tell myself to always talk to the baby. It really isn’t automatic. A baby clearly has no comprehension for most of its first year. If I hadn’t read parenting books that all said to do it, I probably wouldn’t have done it as frequently as we did. And even then there were many times we got lazy and didn’t do it. I often had to remind myself to do it, while looking at a baby with almost no ability to comprehend that was apparent. For those of you parents whose kids are big toddlers or older now, please think back to the stage where all they did was crawl or learn to walk, and their only response was smiles and cries. So I can only imagine how it must be for a paid nanny who doesn’t isn’t the parent and doesn’t have the same vested interest. I’m sure if I was someone else’s nanny, and hadn’t read a bunch of parenting books, I’d probably do what came naturally to me to, and I’m not sure talking to an unresponsive baby would have been on my list of natural things to do. So in my mind, doing what is “natural” is a bit of an artificial construct. Most new parents have no idea what to do with their new babies. We rely on information from more experienced people. In the past it was extended family. In today’s far flung society, it is often books. So the parenting books I’ve read (which serve in lieu of an aunt giving advice, let’s say) tell me to do one thing and my nanny doesn’t really do that, and the result is clearly evident in his lack of Mandarin comprehension. I hope I haven’t offended anyone’s sensibilities by trying to solve that in a way that involves breaking down the process of language interaction with a baby. As I said, I don’t really think there is a “natural” way of interacting with a nonresponsive baby.

15

[quote=“ironlady”]More like, you have to start questioning the understanding the parent has of the natural method, if he expects it to show results immediately, and expects the order of acquisition and the rate of acquisition to be parallel in two languages with different amounts and types of input. He’s had about 7500 more hours of English input than Mandarin, fer Pete’s sake!

And they criticize the “Tiger Mother”… :aiyo:[/quote]
Not sure how you’ve come up with the hours of input for English. We’ve had a nanny since he was three months old. And as I’ve already stated, he gets about 50/50 language time between Chinese and English since then. Right now he gets English from 7-9 am, Chinese from 11 am - 3 pm, and English from 6:30-8:30 pm. This wasn’t always his wake/sleep schedule, but that’s what it is now, and it was always about 50/50 Chinese/English. So are my expectations wrong, given the roughly equal Chinese/English?

16

Is this what working for HESS does to people?

17

How good is your nanny’s English? Maybe you could give her the relevant chapters to read from one of the parenting books you have.
Talking to a baby isn’t automatic for you, but it is for some people, which is how the child-rearing experts figured out it is a good idea.
I remember when I studied child psychology the textbook discussed this in depth - the consensus (at the time) was that talking to a baby helped his/her language and intellectual development. There were some studies that showed that parents who naturally talked to their babies like this were far more likely to be upper-middle class than lower class, and to end up with more successful children; thus the psychologists recommended that poor parents should be trained to interact with their babies like this as well. (Though I know working out the causation here is probably impossible.) The point was that it seemed natural to talk to a baby for some groups of people, and not for others. Maybe the fact that you are giving him better imput in English than he is getting in Chinese is showing the theory that talking to a baby a lot helps with his/her language acquisition.
But to say the baby doesn’t comprehend or react? I think if you spend a lot of time with a baby you will see that the child does comprehend and react. If a parent only spends a bit of time each day interacting with a child because the child is in daycare most of the time, you might not get the rapport needed to realize how the baby is reacting or what he means. Just like a stay-at-home parent will understand words the baby says much sooner than a parent who goes out to work, and both will understand much earlier than an outsider would.
Try saying “Where’s mommy?” to a 6-month-old. He or she will look around for mommy.

I think if you explain to the nanny what you want (over and over, maybe), and stay with her while she is taking care of the child for a couple of days and model what you want, she’ll be better. It would also give you a chance to see just how much Mandarin she does use every day. If it has been the same nanny for all this time, though, I would wonder if maybe she is speaking English to the child when you’re not there.

18

Thanks for your comments bababa. I appreciate a lot of what you said. And no, I didn’t mean to impugn the integrity of nannies by my comment there. Most nannies in the US have not had college educations nor have they read about optimal methods of brain and language development for a baby, from what I have seen. So if anything I just see it as a lack of knowledge for the average nanny. If you educate a nanny on the optimal environment for language social psychological development, I’m sure nannies would appreciate the “softer” side of the job more. But absent the extra education, I think they are more likely to only see the more concrete side of the job (diapers and feedings). I’m just trying to provide my nanny with the education that I have gotten through parenting books that has helped educate us on how to engage the child linguistically.

19

Just read up on Chomsky and Krashen and summarise it to your nanny.

20

I’ll try to be monk-like and just absorb Askr’s comment about being “pushy and overbearing”. In soliciting the wisdom of the forumosa, one must absorb a couple of body blows along the way. :sunglasses:

In answer to your question, yes it was in the job description.