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Chinese Teacher Conference
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9 thoughts on “Chinese Teacher Conference”
I would go just to hear Judy Willis! I loaned this book to my principal over three years ago and am still waiting to get it back!
http://www.amazon.com/Research-Based-Strategies-Ignite-Student-Learning/dp/1416603700/ref=la_B002LLQV3Q_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375893761&sr=1-1
She talks about grammar hitchhiking on stories!
I heard from Haiyun (the organizer): the first day on brain-based instruction is for any teacher who is interested. The second day is the only one intended as a Chinese teacher workshop only.
This is going to be dynamite!! This is the same weekend as the Maine conference!!
We’ll be vibrating CI-style across the country!! Join the club…sponsor an event (coaching, sharing, demo) near you!!
with love,
Laurie
My opinion of this conference is: both days were GREAT! Highly recommend attending any training offered by Judy Willis or Terry Waltz.
Main points from Judy:
– The brain needs both to find patterns and to experience novelty to learn best. Repetitions on a concept by needing to think through the concept again cause that learning to become stronger. She explained the neurological process why.
– Connecting to and comparing to previous knowledge increases retention of new concepts.
– Changes of color, sound, movement (by teacher and/or students), and narrative form all increase the brain’s interest level and therefore learning.
– She gave us a brain-based conference day, with breaks, short tasks with classmates, and time to think of applications we can make with the material.
Some points I took from Terry (her real main points would overlap with any TPRS coach or instructor):
– She shows pinyin-only when introducing new words. Her pinyin is done in such a way to increase the emphasis on the tone of the word (color, tone mark, and capitalization all demonstrate it). She has a URL where you can type and convert your pinyin to that system. I like it a lot.
– She shows characters-only with readings after many reps auditorially. Early reading is by design very repetitive, and done with the class as a group, teacher guiding the read-aloud. She used a PowerPoint slideshow with cartoon-like sketches and one or two lines of text per slide. The kids learning in the demonstration handled it very well.
– Things like noting the spelling of pinyin (ex, x vs. sh sounds), character form, and tones were done in pop-ups taking less than 10 seconds each.
– She uses a lot of gestures with vocabulary, just using them with the word as it’s introduced. She also has them coordinate with the tone(s) of the character(s) in that word — really quite clever, I thought. Ex: han4bao3bao1 was: downward “squirt of ketchup” action, then holding it in place low, and then lifting to bite the imaginary hamburger. I asked about if kids make gestures. Yes, but for many beginning words she’s got them already. When kids do make gestures for other words, she has them include indication of the tone. She’s had kids forget the sound of the word but remember which tone it is.
Links to:
– Converting pinyin into colorful, capitalization pinyin: http://www.chinesepronto.com/triple/flashfix.php
– Converting characters to the same color system she used with pinyin: http://www.chinesepronto.com/triple/colortext.php
I showed this to Annick and she says that a lot of her college bound kids here at Lincoln can remember the characters but one size doesn’ t fit all. I’m reporting here a conversation I had with her about what you wrote Diane bc she had to go teach a class.
Annick says that with different student populations you must differentiate. And she moves from green (pinyin) to blue (Chinese characters) in her instruction and red is English. In this way, she differentiates heavily. She has to do more and more scaffolding. Instead of feeding her students chucks, because of the nature of our kids here at Lincoln many of whom are still wrestling hugely with English, she feeds some of them more easily digested crumbs.
Annick totally agrees with what Terry does but she did want to make the point to me, and this is what I am hearing her say, that we need to not just show sentences and move on to the next sentence for students who have shorter attention spans or language learning issues; we need to chunk ’em down, as Annick said to me.
So on the subject of remembering characters, when the kid is from a more diverse/different socio-economic background, it must be taught in smaller pieces (for Annick that is in pinyin green.) She keeps kids in green for a longer time but her end goal is blue and she requires that all level 2 -4 classes go to blue.
Also, when Annick teaches the characters in smaller chunks, she needs them to first know what it means by sound first. And that goes with Terry’s methodology of only introducing pinyin first.
(I waited until Annick could approve this as written and she did, so my version above of what she said is printed here with her permission.)
Thanks Ben, and please thank Annick as well. I’m in the midst of experimentation on these exact points. Can you ask her to clarify what she means by a chunk? Also, is she talking about pinyin or characters in chunks (or as you said, crumbs)? I watched some of the videos of Annick on the DPS videos a while back, and she used full sentences and stories with kids, and showed characters to what seemed to me to be a year 1 class. What I gathered was that she’d already introduced words in pinyin and was then adding characters to the chart – mentioning to students something to the effect of “for those of you who are ready to add characters” or something like that. Has she changed her approach since then? I would think teaching Chinese to kids who are still working on their English would be a challenge and could require a host of adaptations.
Perhaps I can clarify one aspect of what Terry did: the reading section of the demo included a lot of proper names/nouns in English, particularly at the beginning, so a lot of sentences had 2 or 3 characters with a couple English names. The context and familiar English definitely assisted with comprehension for the demo kids, as they were able later to guess at characters based on words they’d heard that could fit that place in a sentence.
Having a really strong base of acquired vocabulary is important before reading, and Judy Willis’ portion of the conference confirmed that. Judy had said something about not asking the brain to do two things at once and expect it to get either done very well. Yep. I have stopped expecting their brains to get a new sound, meaning, and appearance in characters all at once (yes I did that until this fall). This year it has been really great that saying a word out loud solves any reading problem – inevitably they know it when they hear it. That did not used to be the case. To this point, my scaffolding has been mostly that we’re do reading aloud as a group, with pop-up discussions, and then continuing to provide read-alouds as needed when the kids are doing more independent reading activities. So far so good… it’s the process of helping those who are later to acquire something in written form while continuing to provide adequate interest for those who’ve already got characters very well that is the main area of concern for me. Embedded reading-style approaches have been very helpful. I also find that my year 3 & 4 kids (7th and 8th grade, they both feel like year 2 high school content to me) have more uniform reading ability than the beginning groups, which feel like a much wider range of ability. It’s only 7 or 8 weeks into school for me.
… the context and familiar English definitely assisted with comprehension for the demo kids, as they were able later to guess at characters based on words they’d heard that could fit that place in a sentence….
This is great for kids with sufficient backgrounds and cognitive skills.
Really helpful to see this discussion. We’ve got to keep on trying new approaches with Chinese characters. I’m still in field testing mode. There are a lot of good new ideas that are already worlds better than how I was forced to learn (and I didn’t) characters in college. I wish I could have been at the conference – in my hometown, too!
There is a swelling of interest among NJ Chinese teachers for such a thing. Perhaps we’ll be able to have something similar in the next year or two.