As the development of Chinese economy and the popularization of mandarin fever, more and more people choose to learn Mandarin in China, which include many overseas Chinese students. For they have family environment of Chinese, they can listen or speak a little simple Chinese before they come to China. Therefore, they need to improve their abilities of reading and writing Chinese most. The problem lies on how to reach this goal successfully. I have had some teaching experience from a Chinese language learning program in these years and would like to share with everyone.
Through this Chinese language learning program I have found that overseas Chinese students from Europe and America who learn Mandarin in China are different from those from Korea and Japan, for they prefer to learn by themselves. They would like to get an outline or criteria of assessment at the beginning of the semester so that they can make their plans and arrange their time.
In Chinese class, I usually ask students to underline the words they need to know how to read and words they need to know how to write. This actually decreases the difficulty of Chinese characters and increases the speed of reading Chinese with the distribution method. It is because students of the Chinese language learning program will be scared by too many difficult Chinese characters.
When teaching Chinese in the Chinese language learning program, we can also make full use of the advantage of these students in listening and speaking to learn Characters by speaking. We can choose some dialogues which are oral or tightly related to daily life. These sentences and dialogues are words we often say so that there will not be too many problems in pronunciation, grammar, meanings.
In addition to this, we have Chinese character course for the Chinese language learning program in the primary stage. We teach them from the basic strokes and the law of strokes order to the law of character structures and the radicals in characters. We will try to let them have the ability of learning characters by themselves.
We can also use the strategy of memorizing the whole character patterns. In the Chinese language learning program, we will show the students the evolution diagrams of the Chinese characters and tell them the philosophy and specific wisdom contained by the characters. Sometimes teachers will even use humorous and ridiculous way to explain in order to help them memorize the characters.
It is also a good way to design more exercises for students of the Chinese language learning program after learning the new words in one lesson. Students from Europe and America don’t like teachers who talk too much, but like to study in their favorite ways; they would rather do the exercises required to use their heads and think independently than the homework which requires them to copy characters again and again; they prefer making dialogues and stories with the words and sentence patterns learned from textbooks to reciting texts and dialogues. Therefore we should design many kinds of meaning understanding exercises or character patterns memorizing exercises. Keys for the questions are not important. The purpose is to give students more opportunities to rethink these Chinese characters, re-discriminate the meanings of them and provide students more chances to copy Chinese characters, which will be more interesting than copy them meaninglessly.
Chinese characters are hard to write, but they have endless glamour of arts. Every character is a picture and has all kinds of fonts. The Chinese calligraphy usually attracts students of Chinese language learning program and brings them interest.
We all know that there many factors which influence the speed and result of language learning, including intellect, tendency of linguistic competence, motivation of language learning, strategy of language learning, language anxiety and some acquisition factors and emotion factors. As teachers, we can’t influence students’ motivation, tendency or characteristics but we can encourage them to take more efficient learning strategies to complete their learning tasks. Teachers should learn the features of different students’ learning strategies and encourage them to learn Characters with variety of methods. We should pay more attention to these offspring of overseas Chinese and find more practical teaching approaches.