In the traditional approach to language teaching, the teacher controls everything and explains everything. The students listen, but do very little. This approach is ineffective. Why?
First of all it is highly inefficient. The teacher does all the thinking and all the talking. But surely it is the students who should be thinking and talking. (This is language learning!) The teacher soon gets tired because she is doing all the work. Meanwhile, the students get bored because they are inactive. (If they’re not bored, they’re nervous - the teacher asks them questions from time to time to force them to concentrate.)
The traditional class tends to consist of explanation after explanation. No matter how hard the teacher tries, it is often it is a waste of time: just because someone explains something to you, it doesn’t mean that you have learned it. The teacher can teach until he’s blue in the face, and it may even look like teaching, but the question is, are the students actually learning anything?
If you have an active teacher with a grouf of passive students, there are probalby no questions being formed in the learners’ minds. They are not interacting with the input. They get the answers (from the teacher) even before they have any questions. There is literally nothing for the students to do except listen to the teacher’s ideas about what they should learn. This is bad, really bad.
Instead of the role of explainer, the teacher should focus on creating the conditions that lead to learning. That requires activity on the part of the learner - thinking, questioning, speaking, laughing, interacting, etc. (The learners must be focused on the task, of course.) As an old psychology professor used to tell us “The mind remembers what the mind does.”
In business they say, “Nothing happens until we make a sale”. In teaching it should be, “Nothing happens until the student does something”. The more active the student, the more learning that takes place. Letting people do things for themselves through using the language, is more efficient than explaining it to them. You can take my word for this.
In these podcasts we allow learners to figure out as much of the dialog as possible before giving them the translations. In the new Learning Center we will take this idea much further, by adding exercises to get you thinking about the input more deeply. I’ll have much more to say on this topic in the near future.
The mind remembers what the mind does …
Ken
What are your thoughts on why some words ’stick’ while others I have forgotten a dozen times? The followup question, how do I get the ’stickiness’ level up?
BTW, even teachers with the best intentions often land up talking a lot in class. One teacher told me he wants to talk 30 percent of the time and have the students talk 70%. But I did some ticking off of the minutes and it was the other way around.
I find it quite helpful to be able to ‘chat’ about something I am interested in and then break down bits of what I’ve said and have corrections and feedback from a tutor. But how would one ‘create’ this kind of environment in a podcast scenario?
Hmm, one scenario might be to take a student with nerves of steel and a thick skin and have him say a basic sentence. For example, Please I’d like a few minutes to look at the menu first and so please don’t stand next to the table and add to my stress! Then have Jenny first choose a couple words that aren’t pronounced quite right; then pick out a grammar point or error he made; then give two versions, one a basic sentence to get the meaning across, then an intermediate sentence. This could be a good podcast that gives good ‘review’ for intermediate learners who might still not be pronouncing things quite right, and still interesting for beginners and intermediates with the two sentence versions.
Hi! I’d like to discuss the question of “Is it necessary/better to have 100% native/correction pronunciation models?”
There’s a wealth of experience and opinion on this topic, and it would really be interesting to me to ‘heat’ it up a bit! My personal motivation would only be that I’d like my pronunciation to be realllly good!
Chinese Pod rocks. Now you guys keep talking about four levels. These are Elementary, Newbie, Intermediate, and …. shenme?!?
David, Mandarin the definition is : it is a language based on Beijing pronunciation ( 北京语音) as standard pronunciation, Northern dialect (北方话) as basic dialect, classical modern Chinese language literature (典范的现代白话文) as written standard. So the teacher has to be standard , because as I said, even retroflextion tones can change the part of speech sometimes, it’s not something which could be simply avoided. I am for standard pronunciation. No matter how well your student can acquire, an instructor should always have to be standard, informative and authoritative. Just like students would prefer a teacher with TEFL certificate and experiences rather than a simple native speaker to teach them Chinese, I would expect one to teach me Chinese.
It seems that you get lots of time hanging here… wish I could but I can’t.
By the way you should say 雨下得很大 to describe it rains heavily. The grammar book i mentioned might be good for you, as their targets are students who take Chinese as a second language.
rather than a simple native speaker to teach them English ( aiyo… a typo )
Hi Annie!
Yes, my life is on the internet these days! I think I can live anywhere in the world as long as I have coffee and a broadband collection. I like the mp3s because then I can go outside!
Re: “By the way you should say 雨下得很大 to describe it rains heavily.” vs “It’s raining here today, “下雨亭大的’ xia yu ting da de It’s really raining a lot.”
Maybe my translation to English wasn’t quite right, but I heard the use of “xia yu ting da de” from a Chinese person on their cell phone while I was riding the bus. I really like to pickup and understand these sorts of phrases —just saying “It’s raining heavily” is kind of boring. As you can see from my tendancy to go on and on in English….I would really like that kind of versitility in my Chinese! I thought the ‘ting da de’ was so funny, cause I really thought it was just sprinkling.
If you start your own podcast, I’ll listen!
——————–
Something I reviewed today: *From “A Chinese Grammar”
“I’ll go with him” can be said in various ways depending on your style/formality/region
我和他一起去 wo3 he2 ta1 yi1qi3 qu4 (Neutral)
我跟他一起去 wo3 gen1 ta1 yi1q3 qu4 (Northern dialect: colloq.)
我同他一起去 wo3 tong2 ta1 yi1qi3 qu4 (Southern dialect: colloq.)
我与他同行 wo3 yu3 ta1 tong2xing2 (formal and class)
和，跟，同， 与
Hi David,
I mostly use Gen, so I think I am prone to northern dialect haha.
Nightie.. , if you wanna talk personally, find me on Frappr–> AnnieTC
very good on your new grammar !
As for Ting3 …. de , it means quite. You can add adj in the middle. For instance, ting3 da4 de, ting3 hao3 de, ting3 xin1 de . Xia yu ting3 da4 de , grammartically it should be xia yu xia de ting da de . People sometimes might not follow the grammar, like in English sometimes you hear She DON”T care.
Frappr on ChinesePod.
http://www.frappr.com/chinesepod#
And Annie:
http://www.frappr.com/?a=myfrappr&id=381907
Baaza….check out Frappr.
Baaza.. isn’t it this guy ?
http://www.myspace.com/thebazza
I don’t know if he sent 999 red roses to Jenny as Valentine’s Gift
RE: “Is it necessary/better to have 100% native/correction pronunciation models?”
I was watching t.v. this morning (in China) and there was a English-speaking competition where the competitors were doing skits and such and judges would rate them. For the most part everyone had a pretty significant Chinese accent while speaking English. I’m assuming these contestants were already the ‘best’ of the best from probably a very large pool of candidates, so why is this?
There is quite a lot of English-language learning material here with native-English speakers, so what is it that makes the ‘accent’ such a hurdle? I imagine that their situation is very similar to learners of Chinese, so what is it that makes the ‘path to good pronunciation’ so difficult? It seems easier if you’re in the target-language environment for many years—but it’s not always the case, it seems also if it’s not in your teens or 20s then the results seem to plummet quickly? It’s the old nature-nurture discussion, but I’d like to hear peoples own personal experiences. Maybe in your efforts to learn other languages besides Chinese?
上边我用英语问， 为什么中国人的英语发音不太好，他们有很多老外的叫英语书，mp3.，也英语电影，所以他们应该容易能学，对不对？ 为什么我问这这话？应为我觉得老外学汉语肯定也有一样的challenge. 我也想一想我自己的学中文的方法是好还是不好。现在我爱用中文拨棵，但是很多人对说Ken and Jenny 的中文发音有的时候不标准。我觉得‘听’ 和 ”说“ 不一样，不过“发音”是什么？这么学好？ 大家 “What do you think?”
Hi David,
This article might be of interest to you: “Neuroscientists have discovered why children excel at learning languages”
http://www.acfnewsource.org/sc.....guage.html
I work in a neuroscience lab (though not on language, or humans, so this is my gist from other people’s seminars) and the general assumption these days seems to be that a child’s brain is physically more “plastic” or flexible than an adult’s, partly because they are still in the process of streamlining all of those neural connections. It’s a bit of an exchange, since as you get older, you also become more capable of understanding abstraction.
That said, we also believed for at least a decade that we don’t grow new neurons in adulthood, which is not true. So consider that assumption a work in progress, though it does make sense experientially.
My personal experience in teaching my Chinese coworkers English pronounciation is that they simply can’t hear the difference. But neither can I when I speak Chinese — really it’s only through coaching that I say chi and qi differently, not because I can actually hear the difference between the ch and q sounds. (And I bring this up whenever they complain about English vowels sounding too much alike…)
An interesting topic.
About the whole pronunciation business from the University podcast thread–I have to agree with David. From where I’m standing, I just want to learn some Mandarin. I’m not planning to move to China and make a career out of public storytelling. I don’t think having Ken “mispronounce” Chinese is going to hurt me. Besides, Jenny goes through all the lines anyway, and since I know she’s a native speaker, it’s her pronunciation that I try to emulate. I mean, c’mon–it’s pretty obvious in the podcasts that Ken is Irish and that Jenny is Chinese. Does that really get anybody confused as to the correction pronunciation? I’ll tell you what is confusing–one of those Chinese CDs I bought had two native Chinese speakers–one man and one woman. They would alternate repeating the sentence, and I have to say, their pronunciations were way different on some words. But that’s the real world–everybody speaks differently. I thinkit’s good to hear how different people speak Chinese because that’s what happens when you step out into the real world. It guess it just goes back to what is the “proper” way to teach Chinese. I’m not sure if there really is a “proper” way to teach anything. If there were a “proper” way to teach guitar, then everybody would be holding the guitar like Tommy Smothers and well, there goes rock ‘n roll as we know it!
I feel like having Ken there, giving it a shot, is like being in a classroom with a guy who is not afraid to speak. I think it makes the podcast what it is — really great. Keep up the good work!
Well, after my first demo I really realize how hard it can be to produce a program and make it all perfect. I think now I understand better about Ken and Jenny’s effort, and I don’t want to be too picky on their pronunciation any more. Anyways, what I complain about pronunciation is just a minor problem. I am more concerned with some grammarticall mistakes and typos on PDFs though.
I hope they would put Ken back !!!
Also I am not happy to hear a weird woman’s voice in some recent podcasts where Ken’s role disappeared.
Comparisons
I came across this site today which teaches Chinese. http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/24.....295026.htm
It’s a good effort, there are verbatim transcripts, there is a script. I’m sure they are sincere in their effort, but I hope Cpod never becomes like this! If people really want to hear someone with poor pronunciation reading a script, listen to Cam, bless his effort. If one wants a script that is so unrealistic, listen to this dialogue. They teach you how to ask someone to hold the door for you at the supermarket. Haha…have they ever gone shopping in China. Maybe their staff only shops at Guo Mao.
Anyway, Cpod–please stay the course. D
David,
I listened to the link- this guy’s tones are definitely suspect! (I should know.) Despite that, I think the shows have some value. The problem is that it all feels a bit random. I’m not sure you could base a program of study on it, but it is a decent supplment.