Innovation in Language Learning

At the Confucius Institute at Yerevan State University (CI-YSLU) we believe in delivering high quality Chinese language and culture instruction.

In our article we speak on the new methods of teaching Chinese which are established in YSLU Confucius Institute. Our learners start their learning process from the beginning (pinyin) and than master it with learning Chinese characters. After some period of functioning we pioneered more effective way of teaching Chinese language to Armenian learners. We have worked out and use new flash cards for children groups to make the language more interesting, taking into consideration the particularity of their native language, Armenian, and the standards for the International curriculum for Chinese language education (Table 1).

We use the innovative and interactive methods of developing learners’ communicative ability in Chinese by teaching language structures and functions also by training their listening, speaking, reading and writing as well as cultural skills. We use new games worked out for children groups as well as adults by our specialist which are widely in use in teaching language to children as it makes learning more interesting and efficient.

Table 1

CI-YSLU understands the diverse needs of Chinese language learners and the institutions that wish to offer Chinese language programs in Armenia. Chinese is a new language for our learners, practiced in Armenia since the 2006-2007 academic year, thus it needs to be adopted for the Armenian audience.

There is no doubt that the process of learning any foreign language requires effort, time and commitment. This holds true even more, especially when there is a big difference between one's native tongue and learning a new language. On the other side, knowing the tips and techniques of learning a new language can be digested easier through the differences of two languages.

The Chinese language is known as one of the most difficult languages in the world. And many students are afraid of starting to learn it, despite the growing interest towards Chinese language culture.

Our goal is to make the innovative, yet practical, approach to meet the needs of our learners, find new methods of learning Chinese easier, which will make the learners become more interested and involved in learning Chinese. Our aim is also to reform and create an innovative and effective learning and teaching system for the Chinese language in Armenia through comparing it with our native language taking into consideration that Armenian phonetic system is very rich and gives us a big opportunity to compare and find similar sounds in Chinese. The similarities make the learning of the Chinese language easier for Armenians, which is a bit difficult for Russian learners as the Russian language does not contain many of the sounds (for example zh, t, h).  As most of the learners know English or Russian, the knowledge of those languages helps many of the learners to acquire certain language competence easier having in mind many of the foreign language acquisition patterns.

As it was mentioned above we also use phonetic flashcards with different sounds so that our students can compare Chinese and Armenian and memories them easily (Table 2).

Table 2:

We would like to mention that students in Armenia are multilingual which gives them a big opportunity to compare Chinese not only with their native but also with other languages, mostly - Russian and English.

More and more Chinese language teachers advocate the idea that the fundamental goal of language teaching is to cultivate the communicative ability in the target language. What is taught must be determined by students` needs and must enable them to learn creatively, gradually strengthening their motivation and sense of achievement. We try to create new approaches, which will give learners a chance to compare Chinese with Armenian, to find the phonetic and grammatical similarities in both languages in the beginning stage of learning.

The first thing to realize about interactive teaching is that it is not new or mysterious. When teacher asks questions in class, assigns and checks homework, or holds class or group discussions, he already teaches interactively.  Basically then, interactive teaching is just giving students something to do, getting back what they have done, and then assimilating it himself, so that he can decide what would be best to do next. But this is not enough when it concerns to Chinese as each Confucius Institute is provided with too many interactive materials which of course should be in use by our teachers.

It is well documented that we all learn languages best when immersed in the local culture. With the help of rich multimedia lessons our students will quickly feel like they have stepped in China themselves. They are met by the Chinese who will guide them along their journey in learning Chinese, and they will also learn a bit about the Chinese culture along the way. One of the important parts of learning any new language is learning about country’s people and the food, hence practicing the language in the authentic environment. They learn new words, hear other student speaking and practicing the language so it is fun and entertaining for them.

As the entire student in the world Armenian students also are struggling with Chinese tones and writing characters and many students do not seem to be getting very far. Armenian learners get the chance to practice their newly acquired Chinese via innovative exercises after each lesson. We use a variety of immersion inspired multimedia exercises to allow them to 'internalize' what they have just learned. Our glossary for each chapter is a valuable reference point and enables everybody to review the new material and pronunciation quickly. As a starting point for many Armenian students to learn Chinese easier we use pinyin course first. The Chinese characters are complex to learn and are not essential to start the studying of Chinese with characters.

Pinyin or formally Hanyu Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script.  In our Confucius institute pinyin also is widely used for teaching our students. Pinyin course is the first step for beginners who would like to learn the Chinese language systematically and lays a solid foundation for future learning. We also practice Pinyin video course focuses on teaching the Chinese phonetic system: consonants, vowels, tones, etc. By the end of the course, Chinese learners already master the Pinyin system. The individual sounds of Pinyin are not always the same as English, but as we mentioned before for Armenian learners it is easier as we nearly have all the familiar sounds: for example, ‘c’ in Pinyin is pronounced like the ‘ts’ in ‘bits’, but in Armenian language we have sound “ց”: Pinyin provides our learners the foundation for proper Mandarin pronunciation and allows them to learn Mandarin more easily.（Table 3）.

Table 3:

Simultaneously with mastering pinyin our learners get acquainted with Chinese characters as after it they have to do the second step and start to learn how to read and write characters which generally takes the blame for the language's difficulty. Even Chinese children take longer to reach a certain level of literacy than their counterparts learning to read in languages with phonetic writing systems.

In the Armenian language our students look at a word on the page, immediately know its sound, and can connect it to a meaning directly through the brain's oral lexicon, when they look at a Chinese character, the brain connects it separately to its sound and to its meaning. It takes them a long to learn to read a small text with Chinese characters. Language learning should not be a torture for our students thus we also try to make the process of learning Chinese characters easier: dividing them into strokes and teaching step by step as well as teaching how to differentiate the “radical” and the phoneme which helps to memories characters easily.

For example the word 海洋 (hǎiyáng) means ocean, 海 means sea, the first part of the character 洋is the “Radical” -氵, means water, and the second part 羊is the phoneme which means sheep.

At our Confucius Institute we have Japanese and Korean students who have an advantage as their languages, though unrelated to Chinese, give them some exposure to characters. Teaching Chinese is easier for Japanese and Korean learners. These students make up around two-thirds of foreign students in China, and have therefore been on the receiving end of the bulk of resources allocated to teaching research.

There is hope that careful research and creative thinking will profoundly change teaching methods and materials, and perhaps reveal some of the mysteries of the Chinese language to an eager world.

During the last few decades the demands of Chinese language has greatly changed due to the adjustments taking place in modern social life, related to world globalization. As we already entered the new millennium, there are many realities that people should accept and one thing is that Chinese is an essential world language.

Modern education calls for content-based methods applied in studying Chinese. In the acquisition of the Chinese language, interactive methods are spatially important, given the students` linguistic needs and learning styles. Today’s students need not only to understand the information but also interpret and evaluate it, which requires the ability to synthesize facts and ideas from multiple sources of information.

Established in May 2008, Yerevan State Linguistic University Confucius Institute (YSLU-CI) was unique in Caucasus region till 2010 thus very important in spreading and developing Chinese language in Armenia.

CI-YSLU is the first Confucius Institute, offering innovative programs and services to meet the rising demand for high-quality Chinese language and culture education worldwide.

YSLU CI teachers widely use the interactive materials for the better understanding of the Chinese language as Teaching method is a key notion in Chinese learning. They also use our Chinese Cultural Experimental Corner for making a better environment of learning Chinese.  
The numbers of people learning Chinese are growing in YSLU Confucius Institute and even schools as Chinese is more and more popular in our country, and the demand of the language makes us create modern, more effective methods which can make language learning easier and more productive.

On the one hand language learning can be boring and on the other it is also can be fascinating. For those two results, teachers and teaching methods are the main reasons. In TSLU Confucius Institute we try to find the best way to make the Chinese language learning interesting and enjoyable