Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

The Way of the Learner

Jane Orton, Andrew Scrimgeour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815383048
• eBook ISBN: 9781351206853
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Grounded in analysis of Chinese and international educational concepts and classroom techniques currently used to teach Chinese as a Second Language, and a thorough review of recent research in the field, this volume identifies the learning challenges of the language for native English speakers. Orton and Scrimgeour assess the gap in knowledge and skills between learners' initial and future proficiency levels as L2 Chinese speakers, map their needs as learners towards achieving a high language proficiency, and set out an informed, integrated teaching orientation and practice for the Chinese classroom that responds to those needs. Chapters in the volume address curriculum design, teaching diverse learners and levels, the learning challenges of Chinese oral and literacy skills, grammar and vocabulary, discourse development, cultural understanding, and the affordances of a visit to China. Filled with original and engaging teaching and learning tools and techniques, this book is an essential and rich content resource for primary and secondary teachers, and teacher candidates and educators in Chinese as a Second Language education.

1
Empowering Learning

Introduction

In this opening chapter, the overarching framework of education, teaching, and language learning that shapes the work in this book is set out and the demands of learning Chinese considered within these parameters. It is proposed that special preparation is needed for speakers of European languages if they are to learn Chinese successfully. Apprenticeship exercises which might be undertaken ahead of and then concurrently with the start of language learning are introduced.

The educational framework presented reflects the historically and socio-culturally shaped beliefs, values and practices of current teaching and learning that have evolved in the West and are generally held in Western schools and colleges where Chinese is taught. Yet the vast majority of the teachers of Chinese in these institutions were raised and educated in China, according to beliefs, values and practices that evolved there and which, as has been widely acknowledged by both Chinese and non-Chinese writers, are in important ways different from and also partly in conflict with the Western framework presented here (e.g. Grant, Stronge, Xu, Popp, Sun, and Little, 2014; Hall Haley and Ferro, 2011; Chen and Yeung, 2015a; Zhou and Li, 2015; Orton, 2016; Yue, 2017). Resolving these differences is of paramount concern if the field of Chinese as a Second Language is to advance. However, the authors are aware that resolution cannot be achieved by seeking just to laminate one culture’s ideas over the top of another’s, or to have new practices blindly adopted. It can only be achieved through interculturally sensitive dialogue informed by serious study of propositions. To advance this dialogue, in the second part of the chapter sources of difference in the two broad traditions of teaching are identified, as well as areas of commonality, and the suggestions made by various writers to deal with areas of mismatch are discussed.

It is hoped that this opening chapter will assist teachers, firstly, to appreciate the principles supporting the discussions and suggestions they find in the other chapters of the book; secondly, to become more aware of the framework of knowledge and perspectives that form their own professional knowledge base; and, thirdly, to perceive where and how they may need to reconsider and extend their current understanding if they are to be successful in following the lines of action proposed.

Part 1: The Overarching Framework

Language Learning in Education

Language learning belongs in the school curriculum not simply as ‘training’ for a job or even for life in an interconnected world. As acknowledged in The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2003–2009), the American National Standards for Foreign Language Learning (ACTFL Inc., 2012) and the Australian Curriculum for Languages (ACARA, 2014), the value and affordances of modern language study are understood first and foremost to be potentially educational: it leads to desirable cognitive and affective growth in the learner.

Specifically, a central purpose for language study in schools is the raising of students’ awareness of the nature of language—how it names and frames those matters the language user groups believe, value, and enact in practice and the things they make use of; how it constructs, develops, negotiates, and stores knowledge; how knowledge is presented via different modes of communication and different types of texts; how it carries the power divisions that exist between groups; and how it is also open to being re-formed and made to serve new purposes. It is with these possibilities in mind that educators such as Michael Young (2012) in the UK include a cquiring the ability to speak and read a foreign language, as ‘powerful knowledge’, which, like the study of History and Literature, has the potential for giving students the tools to ‘think the un-thinkable’.

Teaching Principles

Education is a social practice. As educators, teachers draw on a range of complex bodies of knowledge, which they synthesise in their design of curricula and lessons. These designs are based on probabilities drawn from research and theory and from actual past experience. But while there are routines that can be carried over from prior lessons, all lessons are also new creations and hence, actual teaching is a combination of applied science and artistry. While proceeding on an ‘as if it will be predictable’ basis, teachers in practice must also be ready to perceive and analyse situations which arise at the time that are novel, unexpected or uncertain, and on the spot design, test and assess quite a new action in response to them (Schön, 1984).

This way of thinking about teaching presupposes a meaning for the word ‘to teach’ which encompasses not only ‘presenting content to students’, but also ‘taking responsibility to help students to learn content’. Thus, ‘to teach’ means presenting knowledge in activities which are most likely to make it learnable by the students, and at the least cost to them in terms of time and effort. In practice it assumes that work in the classroom will be interactional and active, creating a two-way dialogue between students and teacher and students and students. It is often in the dialogue and in the experimental activities in which students try things out for themselves that novel situations arise in a lesson.

The knowledge bodies that teachers draw on are from the broader dimension of education and from the more concentrated dimension of their own discipline area. In language teaching, the former involves theories of education and studies in pedagogy, curriculum design and assessment, as well as work in psychology on topics such as child development, learning norms and interpersonal communication. In the field of foreign and second language learning, teachers draw heavily on bodies of knowledge created by a range of linguists such as phoneticians, grammarians, and semanticists, as well as research by applied linguists in areas such as discourse analysis, lexicography and language acquisition. They also seek practical knowledge in the teaching methods of experienced practitioners. Knowledge from both the broader and the more concentrated bases are used in planning teaching and are engaged in acts of artistry to provide direction and clues as to what might need to be changed in the teaching practice if student work is to improve. Developing artistry requires practice, but it will only be effective if it is being informed by sound knowledge and a good repertoire of strategies for action.

The Practice of Teaching

As a number of educators over many decades have proposed, the key tenet of successful teaching in this way is that it must be subordinated to learning:

If teaching is to be effective, the activity to which it is addressed should be perceived as meaningful, satisfying an intrinsic need in the learner and ‘incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant for life’ as perceived by the learner.

(Vygotsky, 1930/1978: 118)

Unfamiliar concepts and ideas need to be grounded within the scope of ordinary life-experience if students are to be able to grasp them.

(Dewey, 1938: 26)

If real success is to attend the effort to bring a person to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he is and begin there… so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.

(Kierkegaard, 1959)

You must be with them where they are.

(Gattegno, 1972)

The central point of this advice is that it requires the teacher to find the student, not the other way around. The route forward along the learner’s way from where the student is to somewhere beyond their current experience is initiated by effective teacher scaffolding of activity that

mostly takes the form of supporting or challenging, in ‘joint involvement episodes’…. The former serves to maintain the student’s current behaviour and to facilitate it [and] in the latter, the adult gears demands to those aspects of the task that lie just beyond the level that the child has currently attained, in order to carry the child forward in a series of carefully graduated steps at a pace appropriate to that individual

(Schaeffer, 1996: 266)

This kind of teaching presupposes that, during the lesson, there are times when the teacher is available to observe and create effective suggestions for students who are at work independently. It also proposes a clear separation of roles for teacher and student: the teacher (T) works on the student (S) while the student works on the knowledge (K), as shown in Figure 1.1 below.

Of course, the teacher will have already worked on the knowledge (the content) to ensure that it can be made independently available and accessible to the students in class.

Figure 1.1 Teacher, student, knowledge relationship

Source: Adapted from Gattegno, 1970

Chinese Language Learning

The Reality

Faced with the noble aspirations set out earlier, engagement with the reality of Chinese learning is often a cold shower. In international publications and conference papers, evidence constantly shows that what most school age and undergraduate learners from Europe, North America and Australia find to be ‘hitherto unthinkable’ in their encounter with Chinese language are the overwhelming challenges they meet when trying to learn it. Far from being led along an empowering path, many end up despondent about success. This can lead them to discontinue their Chinese studies. Even those who do persevere often remain dissatisfied, feeling that they only ‘half know’ what they have studied and despairing of making real progress to new levels. High school graduates of Chinese learned in a classroom do not normally come near the level of proficiency that their peers taking a European language attain. In undergraduate courses, teachers have long noted that ‘students ultimately hit a bottleneck as they find it more and more difficult to increase their Chinese language level’ (Yin, 2003). Typically, ‘some students who make it to advanced level Chinese classes… have problems finding effective strategies [for] reading and writing… and continue using lower level vocabulary learned in beginner Chinese’ (Xing, 2003). And at the pre-tertiary level: ‘The lack of success in the majority of K-12 programs in terms of helping students attain a functional level of proficiency has become a challenge for CSL programs in US elementary and secondary schools’ (Ke, 2016).

This sobering assessment of current CSL outcomes holds true in other English-speaking countries as well (e.g. CILT, 2007; Orton, 2016) and in Western Europe more broadly (e.g. 徐(Xu) and Kooi, 2017; Gabbianelli, Formica, and Chang, 2017; She, 2017; Rukodelnikova, 2017). While not all students are willing to put in the effort required, especially among those dragooned into learning the language at school, it remains clear that even students who do apply themselves still only achieve a level of Chinese proficiency well below that of students of other languages. Considering this state of affairs from a professional perspective, we can say that this is primarily because it is still early days in the field of CSL, and there is a great deal yet to be discovered about the teaching and learning of Chinese internationally, especially at the pre-tertiary level. International English, at the same stage, was not the success it has since become, either; and when English did begin to spread internationally it was able to draw on the very extensive English teaching to adult and child immigrants that had already been going on inside English-speaking countries for decades. Although also reaching back many years, teaching Chinese to foreign learners was a particularly narrow field in China until quite recently and the experience and resources within it are virtually limited to the teaching of self-motivated, educated young adults already in tertiary institutions.

The authors of this book believe that there are three main areas in which CSL needs to develop if learning outcomes are to improve. One is continuing analysis and description of the language in use, especially very modern Chinese, of itself and in relation to the first language of the major groups studying Chinese; a second area is a much greater focus on the nature of the learning that Chinese demands of foreign students; and the third area is the informed preparation of knowledgeable and able teachers. The line of development devoted to language analysis is beyond the scope of this book. Instead it is focussed on the second area needing to be opened up: the nature of the learning tasks that Chinese demands of foreign learners from the perspective of the learner not the native speaker; this also provides an important but little recognised part of the knowledge and skills of an able teacher, the third area needing development.

Chinese Language and Resources

Chinese is a language long used by a very large, very diverse set of people in China and in many countries beyond China’s borders. Historically, there have been periods of intense work on analysing and organising the language and in the past three decades as the digital age emerged, a great deal of documentation of the modern language has been achieved. While there is still more to be done to bring knowledge of Chinese usage up to par with our knowledge of some other languages, the work undertaken to date to codify what is said and what will be accepted as a public standard has been very useful for the field of Chinese as a Second Language (L2 Chinese). This knowledge forms our understanding of the goal of language teaching, the finishing line for learners, which is located in the contemporary language of today’s first and international users of Chinese.

When we look at resources for teachers—coursework for teacher candidates and textbooks and other materials for actual teaching—we find most exercises and activities offered at all levels are no more than the presentation of pieces of the final goal—the perfect Chinese text—combined with opportunities for the student to hear, say, read or write them in gradually larger chunks. Thus, the resources do not start where the students are, on the starting line, nor do they even c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• 1 Empowering Learning
• 2 Establishing Oral Skills
• 3 Developing Literacy Skills
• 4 Generating Grammar and Vocabulary
• 5 Adapting Curriculum
• 6 Addressing Diversity
• 7 Integrating Culture
• 8 Widening Experience
• Afterword
• Index