Last week, in a discussion here about how CI Chinese instruction has its own peculiarities, I asked Diane to write on the topic and she has obliged so thank you, Diane! Her response occurs in three articles here over the next three days.
Diane reports:
I was recently asked to describe some facets of Chinese language and how CI teaching addresses those aspects. I’m happy to do so. Note that this is not how I talk with students (unless they ask for such details). I hope it’ll help teachers of other languages understand how Chinese works and how teaching with CI adapts to Mandarin Chinese.
Diane
First a short description of how I’m teaching:
Step 1: Establish meaning by showing students new words in pinyin next to English meaning; creating gestures for those words. (Part of Monday in class)
Step 2: Massive aural input somehow on those words. (Most of Monday and Tuesday in class.) Novelty and variety of activity is great here.
Steps 1 & 2 goal: connect meaning to new Chinese sounds.
Step 3a: Read in characters only, beginning with reading aloud together as someone points to each character as it is read aloud. Readings are designed to be repetitive, meaningful, and interesting (and the repetition needed means the texts are rather long).
Step 3b: The next day, they read again more independently either with the same text or a parallel text (again with plenty of reps). Of course the exact activity varies widely – novelty is key!
Step 3 goal: Connect the meaning-sound to how it looks.
I’m still experimenting with how many new words to introduce (depending on the class and time needed for students to acquire in previous experience, 2, 3, or 4 words or structures). I’m also still experimenting with how much time to spend reading with new words. I think they need more than 50% of the time seeing Chinese, and am working on how to manage that.