Innovation in Language Learning
Re-Enforcing Chinese Curriculum Design and an Effective Method of Teaching Chinese towards Non-Chinese Speakers
April Zhang, MSL Master (Hong Kong)
Abstract
In the aspects of teaching methods and techniques, teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speakers, especially towards adult students, is still a new field. The lack of compelling effective methods is largely due to the unique characteristics of Chinese, primarily that Chinese characters and their pronunciations have little or no correlation comparing to other languages. In this paper, I analyze a few teaching methods which are accepted by different people or in different times, including:
1. Teach listening/speaking through pinyin only
2. Teach reading/writing/listening/speaking at the same time before 1910s
3. Teach reading/writing/listening/speaking at the same time after 1950s
4. Teach reading/writing/listening/speaking at the same time in the 21st century
5. Teach characters with pictorial origins first
6. Teach massive amount of characters using flashcards
After pointing out the drawbacks of these methods, I present a new teaching method and a re-enforcing Chinese curriculum design. The new method is distilled from long time teaching and researching. And the innovative curriculum design serves as the basis of the teaching method. Within one to two years, with a minimum requirement of one two-hour lesson per week, a beginner student with zero background in Chinese, who also has demanding tasks from work or life (a typical student of mine), is able to make substantial progress in Chinese.
This method has three stages for beginner students to go through. I give detailed explanations on how these three stages work along with the curriculum.
The curriculum includes two stand alone and also related series, Mandarin Express series and Chinese Reading and Writing series. Through outlining the three stages of teaching and learning, I demonstrate the re-enforcement relationship between these two series, which beginner students can greatly benefit from. Special emphasis is given on the selection of a small number of characters (a total of 320 characters), with statistical research support and explanations of why that matters.
