I’m hoping to do some podcast interviews with some of the leading figures in the field of Mandarin instruction over the coming weeks. (I can’t mention any names right now, as everything has to be confirmed.) If you have any burning questions that you want me to pose to the leading lights – prominent professors, authors, etc – why not post them here and I’ll pose them in the interviews. (I’ll even credit you with the incredibly smart questions in the interview.)
For my own part, I wil be asking about pronunciation and writing (amongst other things).
Ken carroll
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
“How important is it for male learners to be exposed to male voices from an early stage?”
Women tend to speak clearer and their voices are dominant in a lot of training material. My male language partnerswas too polite to mention it, but when I broached the subject he light up and said “yes you should do this and this etc.”.
My female language partner said nothing but suddenly introduced a recording of her husband with a vaque suggestion that I “should listen to more male voices”. When pressed she addmitted that I spoke Chinese ‘higher’ than she expected from my English voice.
Once the subject was broached these two seemed to agree that foreign males :
1. Often spoke in too high a pitch, making them sound nervous (nervous was highlighted more than feminine)
2. foreign males often used female speech patterns (pitch being only a part of the story).
Usually this was corrected over time if someone spent sometime in China.
Ironically when I played a male voice to my friend from an instructional CD someone had given me, he replied “Yes he was probably picked becasue he speaks a lot like a women”. hmm….
Yes I would like like to speak Mandarin correctly, but in the final analysis if in some hypothetical future I am hanging out with a bunch of regular Beijing guys I would rather sound like part of the crowd even if that means fudging a few tones etc.
If you come from a non-tonal language then even if you understand intellectually that tone is relative not absolute it hard not to raise your pitch towards the voices you are hearing.
If I hadn’t become aware of this myself, I probably wouldn’t have been alerted to it.
Ken
Big question. You don’t mention how these experts feel about a non academic approach to learning a language. By this I mean we Cpoddies try to learn what we want, how we want, when we want and no grading except how we choose to grade ourselves. I think this is a big difference from traditional learning where a grade is important because of (1) what mother will think or (2) how it affects a GPA (grade point average) I do beleive this helps the tradtional teacher demand students learn on his (teachers) terms -what they expect and when they expect it
So keeping this in mind my big question now is. I have plenty of imput resources from just Chinesepod alone. If you never produce another lesson, the sum total as of today is an incredible imput. But how to get output? You have made imput : fun, easy and infecting. How do experts no matter their philosophy assist in creating output that is generated by their students or us CPODDIES when we need it in an equally fun and non tradional environment. For instance mom’s with seven kids can’t just fly to China for a few months to practice speaking and get timely, user specific feedback. Even though I am not a mom nor have seven kids I assume you are not going to respond positively to my request for Jenny to come to Jubei and help me with my pronunciations.
So how to teach output.
Mike in Jubei
These interviews are a great idea and I eagerly await them. Here are some question ideas. There are so many things one would want to know. Several books could be written (and have been)!
- If teaching (and learning) of Chinese as a second language, were completely ideal, what would it look like? Is it possible within existing institutions, such as universities and businesses?
- Tell me something about the history of CSL pedagogy over the last 50 years. What has changed?
- What do you see as the future of CSL pedagogy?
- In teaching CSL, how do you deal with hype about the difficulty of Chinese? Do students come to Chinese more anxious than students of other foreign languges?
- What are the language goals of your students vis-a-vis Chinese?
- How often do CSL students achieve fluency, or near fluency? Why, or why not?
- What advice do you have for non-native CSL teachers, or CSL students who want to become CSL teachers?
Ken,
I have always been interested in how Chinese ESL learners approach language learning versus the approach taken by foreigners learning Chinese. Are there any significant differences between cultures that provide advantages or hinder language learning / acquisition ?
For example, are Chinese learners of English more apt to initiate an English conversation with a foreigner in order to improve their skills ? From my experience, many English learners of Chinese appear to be hesistant to engage in practical real-world language exchanges, even within the confines of the classroom. Maybe this is a generalization, but I would be interested in hearing from the language training experts on any cultural differences they may have noticed.
Looking forward to the podcast.
Ken,
My second burning question: “How significant is it that many foreigners beggining to learn Chinese have had no or almost no previous exposure to the language”.
In comparison lets say, to many Chinese people learning English who have perhaps been exposed to lots of snippets of English in the past whether they unerstand it or not. I have noted quite of lot of English (albeit of the American variety) used on Chinese TV).
For example I can (with the help of my kids and the internet I tested this) easily discern between Spanish, Italian, French, German and Dutch.
Until I trained my ear a little (which involved listening to a fair amount of Chinese I didn’t understand right from the word go), I couldn’t distinguish between Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean, Cantonese etc.
I think I gained alot from this enforced ear training prior to studying but would be interested in an some opionions.
My burning question is how to get from “advanced” or “high-advanced” Chinese to “superior” level Chinese (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL] designations). For many years now, my Chinese has been languishing at what I call “Fairy tale level” Chinese. For example, I can’t put together an intelligent sentence on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, but I can tell you all about the Dragon King’s Third Daughter. The Chinese have a long history and rich culture and they are rightfully proud of that. Unfortunately, that is most of the content that seems to get taught no matter where I’ve studied : classical literature, culture, and history. I love those topics, but they’re not helping me to operate as an educated adult in the contemporary world. I’ve been reading a lot more news in Chinese off the Internet, and it’s starting to help, but I still cannot understand the spoken news at even a 70% comprehension rate, or even most television and radio advertisements for that matter. I think it’s going to take a lot of consistent effort and time. To me, the curriculum seems to be weak and impractical, both at American universities and abroad. Maybe that’s changed recently, so I can’t say for sure. Anyway, that’s my predicament, and that’s my burning question. If they can get around to this topic, I would be grateful.
Given the cultural differences between English speaking Mandarin students and Chinese teachers, and given that it takes many more years for an English speaker to reach a point where they can teach Mandarin, we might expect Mandarin teachers in general to be less in touch with the experience of absolute beginners compared to say Spanish teachers.
Is this true, is it a problem, and if so how is it overcome?
— — —
Yes Chris, as far as I can tell the first six times I heard Mandarin spoken were my first six Mandarin lessons.
Writing aside, Chinese is not really more difficult to learn as a second language than others. How can this perception be changed.
This will just torture them, so hopefully they are good questions.
Q: Do you have an idea or goal in mind in terms of retention and success rates? How many of the students you teach reach their goals? What percentage of your students get to a level you would describe as fluent? How much do you consider your methodology over individual effort as a factor in reaching these levels?
Q: Most people have a hard time going from an intermediate level to an advanced level, or from an advanced level to a very fluent level, what factors in your methodologies or experience seem to factor into those individuals that do make the jump?
Q: As a professor of Mandarin studies, what are the limiting factors and opportunities for growth in the discipline?
Q: If you had to teach your best friend how to speak Mandarin, describe a session with them.
Q: If you had to teach your worst enemy Mandarin, describe a session with them.
Q: There are many myths, truisms or beliefs about Mandarin, which one would you first strike down and which would you yell out to the world?
Q: If the Bill & Melinda Gates fund came to you and asked what would you like to do with our money for Mandarin, what would you do?
Q: For someone just starting to learn Mandarin, what’s something free that they can do on their own to learn just that little bit better?
As I sit here, listening to the crashing waves (or is that rustling corn), on the beach here in Des Moines, on vacation at long last, I can’t quite manage not to pipe in with a few Q’s of my own. Thanks for the format, Lantian. And thanks for your questions, as well.
Q: What do you feel about a non-native teacher, who is not totally fluent, yet whom students really relate and respond to, and who gets those students really excited about learning Mandarin?
Q: What role do you think a textbook should play in language instruction?
Q: What elements make up a good textbook?
Q: What role, if any, does explicit grammar instruction play in your curriculum?
Q: What role does vocabulary play at the word level and how do you develop it? How about larger lexica such as polywords, collocations, pat phrases, institutional phrases, sentence and text frames?
Q: Do you tie the written language to the spoken, or do you teach them separately (e.g., dialogues written out in characters)?
Q: What use do you make of authentic materials at each level of instruction?
Q: Do you give daily dictation quizzes (AKA 听写s)?
Q: Do you require students to write characters from memory?
Q: How do you teach writing?
Q: Do you have students translate English sentences, or transform Chinese sentences based of sentence patterns?
Q: Are you familiar with performance-based instruction and assessment?
Q: If so, how do you incorporate it into your curriculum?
Q: What role does technology play in your classes?
Q: How do you help students develop intrinsic motivation?
Q: How do you take care of students’ affective domain?
Q: Do you teach with a concern for students’ disparate and multiple intelligences? If so, how?
Q: How do you help students become autonomous learners?
Q: Do you explicitly help students develop personal learning strategies?
Q: How important is extrinsic motivation in your philosophy of teaching and learning (e.g., external rewards, grades, etc)?
Q: How much input, if any, do students have in the shaping of curricula?
Q: Do you consider your philosophy as student-centered? Why or why not?
Q: How often do you engage students in pair work, group activities, or inner-outer circle activities?
Q: Do you have students engage in role-play activities?
Q: Do you employ many simulated “reality” situations?
Q: Do you take your students on many field trips?
Q: Do your students get many opportunities to engage with native speakers, either with classroom visitors, or out in the community?
Q: How often are your classes or activities teacher-fronted?
Q: How do you assess students?
Q: How often do you assess students?
Q: Do the results of student assessments ever cause you to make curricular or other changes?
Q: Do you ever have students assess you & your methods? If so, do you make modifications to your teaching or curricula based on that input?
戴
How do you give students confidence in their ability?
I just listend to a snippet of your interview with Dr. Tim Xie on the Saturday Show and will definitely check out the rest when it’s posted. He said something that I had been thinking about recently when I started up my Chinese studies again and that is learning to write Chinese is most difficult, but speaking it not as much. Dr. Xie mentioned typing Chinese as the new way of learning characters.
If that is the case, is it necessary to learn how to write the characters which would require the most time and effort? Is learning to recognize characters and how they sound good enough to be fluent? Will learning to write the characters make it less likely to forget them vs. just learning to recognize them or is there really no difference? Have any studies been done on this?
michmosh,
Just from my own experience, I’m much more likely to forget a character if I don’t learn how to write it. I’ve seen Dr. Xie’s beginning Chinese course syllabus on the web and he does require assignments to be turned in typed. I take Chinese courses at a different CSU campus and we need to write by hand, but find typing is helpful at times. Typing alone doesn’t help me write.
For common input methods, you will need to know the pinyin and be able to select the character you want from a list. It doesn’t require you to know how to write to do this, just be familiar enough to pick the right one from a short list. This doesn’t necessarily help with reading text “old school” style (reading something printed on a page, not on-line with other electronic tools available). Knowing how to write helps me do this.
Hi Michmosh and James,
From my own experience I think finding a mix of strategies that fit you and keep you writing frequently and over a long period of time is going to reap the most returns. I have done pretty much everything in writing, things like practicing calligraphy, texting over a mobile phone, typing online, and plain paper handwriting. I often will take the text message exchanges I have on my mobile and write them down in a notebook, the only reason is practice. All these things however I am not convinced necessarily lead to writing easily. For example I don’t think writing characters 20 times each does very much. I caveat this by saying though that it is good to early on burn-in the muscle memory for the most frequent words so that stroke order becomes very natural for other characters.
Anyway, up until now I have always felt ‘blocks’ in my writing, by this I mean that while handwriting I’ll get stuck on which is the proper first few strokes, or I’ll only remember parts of certain characters. This changed quite dramatically recently and I feel like writing seems to come out of my hand much easier now. What happened? I haven’t done any extra specific handwriting kinds of exercises in the last two months, but I did watch daily for a month 2-4 hours of a t.v. drama with dubbed Chinese and hanzi subtitles. I noticed over time, as it was a drama about just 4-5 people that I kept seeing the same characters. Occassionally I would look up some words, but mostly I didn’t. The other day I sat down to write something with my usual trepidation, but it was the weirdest feeling as the charcters flowed out of my hand. I attribute this change to seeing hanzi daily and having to ‘scan’/'read’ quickly as the t.v. show kept moving along. I think this speeded up the ‘hanzi in my head’ and it resulted in faster writing too!
I don’t think Chinese hanzi is any harder to learn how to handwrite than other languages, just looking at Korean or Arabic makes my head spin. Even Russian which kinda looks like ABC I think would make me wince. My next step is getting a Chinese person to teach me how to write Chinese in ‘cursive’, that’s not calligraphy per se, it’s the scribble that you see a Chinese person writing on paper that is definitely not like the perfect square balanced hanzi most of us practice and handwrite.