Training and Professional Development Options

Lit stations to supplement TPRS

I (obviously) swear by TPRS to produce the maximum oral proficiency in students in the minimum time, and there’s nothing that can compare for building listening skills. But the method was built with Spanish in mind, and then expanded to encompass other alphabetically-based languages. In Chinese, it simply is not feasible (at least not with the levels I teach; I think you could in college where a “just go memorize it” approach is considered appropriate) to do PQA or a...

Fishing

We’re on a two-hour delay schedule for snow (the fact that this was a fairly wimpy snowfall notwithstanding). Putting this on top of a day and a half of missed classes last week for a bad ice storm, plus my being out yesterday for a release day, means that pretty much everyone has forgotten what we’re “really” doing. So I hand out the words to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Chinese. Read read read, translate translate translate…fairly straightforward stuff. Then...

Directional gestures

Directional gestures are something I’ve been doing with Chinese teaching for about six years, but this is the first year I’ve had enough students at the same level to see what the broad effect of them is. (Of course, to be rigorous, it’s impossible to separate the directional gestures from the tonal spelling from the color coding…but, oh well.) The use of gestures seems to be “optional” in TPRS these days, but for Chinese teaching, I find them extremely useful....

Picking up words

We are now midway into our fourth month of Chinese classes with my beginners (probably around 42 hours of class time, since we meet 42 minutes a day in theory). I have never presented the word “because” 因为 as an item, but I have used it in speaking to the kids, and since they don’t know it, I gloss it when it occurs. The first kid spontaneously produced a complex sentence two weeks ago. Now, one after another, they’re falling...

On keeping Pinyin in its place

Pinyin is great. You can type with it. You can look stuff up in the dictionary with it. You can chat with it online. When Pinyin is not great, though, is when it takes the spotlight away from characters, such as on a page students are supposed to be reading. During the year of Russian class I took in college (peer pressure; all my friends were Russian minors and there I was with just Chinese!) we had a wonderful teacher...

Picture support for emerging readers of Chinese

One of the most frequent questions I’ve heard recently is “How can I get my Western learners of Chinese to read characters?” I think we take a somewhat schizophrenic approach to teaching Chinese at times. On the one hand, we are constantly reminding people how it is a “Class 4″ language — so difficult — and on the other hand, we are often failing to give our students the same support that any kindergartener or first-grader receives in terms of...

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