Diane in Chicago shares a troubling situation. We need to have a “form letter” response for situations like this:
Hi Ben,
Looking mostly for sympathy from the group. I need to reply to this email about one of my graduating 8th graders. She’s a great student and a quiet girl in general; she is right on track to developing fluency in Mandarin. She’s got excellent listening & reading comprehension & writes paragraphs that communicate clearly, with use of transitional words and a wide range of vocabulary – and it’s often creative in content.
Anyway, this is most of an email from her future Chinese teacher:
With regard to our current program and placement for [name of student], it would help to know what book(s) she has been using.
We use Beijing University’s Boya Hanyu series. In our class a heavy emphasis is placed on the ability to read and write Chinese characters.
If [name of student] is able to comfortably read and write 600+ characters I would say that she might be a good candidate for Mandarin 2. In both Mandarin 1 & 2 students are required to write characters from memory.
On the flip side, the good news is that [name of student] sounds like a very capable student and Mandarin is incredibly difficult and so wherever she is ultimately placed she will have loads to learn!
The reality is that when you factor in pinyin, the tones, proper stroke order, character evolution, and writing few students – if any! – are absorbing 100% of the information and so review might be beneficial as well.
I’d be happy to look over any work she has done to better assess her level.
This teacher admits his students aren’t retaining material. He openly and directly tells me that Chinese is “incredibly difficult”!! Yet somehow, over 1 billion Chinese of all intellectual abilities use it daily to communicate, yes even to read. He teaches to the left brain memorizing, emphasizes production, and in Chinese the production of the latest kind acquired – unprompted hand-writing of characters. Even most Chinese will forget how to hand-write characters they rarely write. (Since the advent of computer tools, I cannot at all understand why he thinks hand-writing characters without prompts is important, except that it’s old school practice in China.) This teacher is in his first year of teaching Mandarin and that is a small glimmer of hope to me… that he’ll come to his senses over time (as I did) and seek better ways to teach.
So shall I show him her recent free writes, which are incredible, or send him the story-length reading and responses that she did so well? Apparently if it’s not hand-written, he doesn’t like it. Good grief.
Anyway, my goal is to explain in brief, without rancor, how I teach and my expectations for beginning levels. I’m going to refer to the Krashen summary website as the theory on which I base my teaching, and the ACTFL 90% target language use and communication goals as the basis for my emphasis on Interpersonal (not Presentational handwriting!). And then send him the Beginning Chinese High-Frequency list created by a few Chinese teachers as the basis of my language content. The thing about my student going to this school next year is that she’ll probably be able to do well at the memorizing; her character hand-writing is very good already. But will she continue growing in fluency? He’s force-feeding 600 characters a year. That is unreasonable in a high school classroom. Even most traditional programs think that about 300 characters is year 1 college material. Beginning readers are aimed at that level.
I know lots of others get to deal with these situations. I only occasionally have them (only once before was it this bad).
Diane