Advanced materials

At the advanced level, grammatical study most likely centers on discourse structures, production of coherent paragraphs and different styles of speech/writing, even though grammatical elements continue to be learned in a cumulative way. In other words, all grammatical elements listed for the intermediate level should be reiterated in textbook lessons for advanced Chinese.

Feng (2003a) has advocated for years the importance of teaching written grammar at the advanced/superior level, warning language practitioners that without it, students will never be able to write formal Chinese. Due to my limited knowledge and experience with teaching Chinese at the superior level, this book will not discuss materials or methodology relevant to that level. Nonetheless, my teaching experience from the elementary to the advanced level suggests that continued review of lower levels of grammatical elements enhances the learning of advanced grammar because the latter is built on the former. Following are some of the most important elements commonly seen in advanced teaching materials:

• Discourse connectors

• Discourse devices

• Formal vs. informal speeches

• Speech acts

• Pragmatic factors

• Idiomatic usage

• Literary, prosodically bound, and technical/specialized expressions

Students at this stage have a good understanding of Chinese grammar in general.

What they need most is to digest what they have learned and make the effort to use grammatical functions and expressions in various contexts and communicative situations. Bai et al. (1996) include the following topics in their third-year textbook, Beyond the Basic: Communicative Chinese for Intermediate/Advanced Learners:

• Childhood

• Describing a Person

• Master Salesperson

• Every Field of Work

• Problem-solving

• Lunch

• Music

• Crime

• Love

• Poverty

• Culture

• Happiness

• Elections

• Movies

• Extemporaneous Speech

The purpose of choosing these topics for advanced Chinese is to stimulate student interest in conversing about subjects that they are familiar with and to develop their description, narration and reasoning competence in Chinese.

National and international current affairs are also very good topics for advanced class discussion because of their topical, timely nature, but they fail the test of time and are, therefore, often excluded from textbooks of advanced Chinese.

Nonetheless, a careful selection of an appropriate amount of non-textbook teaching materials about current affairs can not only pique students’ interest in learning, but also reinforce what they have learned about commonly used grammatical elements in colloquial Chinese speech and writing.

So far, I have discussed three levels of Chinese teaching materials. One may find that beyond third-year Chinese there are fewer textbooks and other teaching materials available. This is probably because there are fewer users and therefore it becomes less profitable for publishers to produce such materials. Jin et al. (2000) compiled a multi-media courseware for advanced (third- or fourth-year) Chinese, including textbooks, workbook, CD ROM, audio and video cassettes. Topics in this set of teaching materials range from single-parent households, film and theatre personalities, to baby adoptions, peasants and private entrepreneurs, and market economy. In addition, students at the fourth-year level and above can be given authentic literature and media by teachers so the need for texts is less

critical and the need for teacher creativity and resourcefulness is proportionately more critical.

2.5 Authenticity

The authenticity of teaching materials is a subject of consideration when compiling teaching materials for students of different proficiency levels. In the field of teaching Chinese as FL, two major camps have been formed: those who believe in traditional controlled teaching materials, and those who believe in pure authentic materials. Traditional teaching materials are most likely composed and filtered by teachers and textbook compilers so that the number of characters and sentence structures used in lessons fall within the limit of the students’ ability, whereas pure authentic materials are selected from various publication genres without editing and rewriting and, therefore, contain structure and vocabulary not always covered in class. Influenced by the performance and proficiency approach to foreign language acquisition, some teachers prefer using authentic language materials, such as street signs, restaurant menus, train schedules, newspaper articles etc. as teaching materials while others ignore these types of materials completely especially at the earlier stages of acquisition. In recent years, more and more teachers see the benefit of using both types of materials in teaching. This leads to the following questions: What constitutes authentic material? What is the significance, if any, of using one type of material over another? There is no question that newspaper articles, advertisements, street signs, television news and shows, radio broadcasts, etc. provide authentic Chinese. The question that has long been debated among Chinese language teachers at the annual meeting of the CLTA is whether a dialogue or essay written by Chinese teachers with a controlled number of characters, sentences, and discourse devices is also considered authentic Chinese. It is an interesting question and, not surprisingly;

there is no agreement on its answer. Some say yes, some are less certain, and others say no. Interestingly, if we put the question aside and limit our examination to the existing teaching materials, we find that the amount of commonly recognized authentic material included in textbooks increases along with student proficiency levels. In other words, students with higher Chinese proficiency use more authentic materials than those with lower proficiency. Courses, such as Newspaper Reading and Chinese Film, are usually offered at the intermediate high or advanced low level using the ACTFL scale. This is because students with intermediate or higher level Chinese proficiency are able to comprehend and digest authentic materials better than those with lower proficiency. Imagine teaching elementary Chinese with only authentic materials, such as a recorded conversation among family members at dinner table or at a birthday party without editing any part; teachers would have to explain many different concepts before students could understand the speech at all, not to mention how long it would take students to communicate in the same manner. This would result in a low success

rate among students and a classroom atmosphere not conducive to learning.

Hence, I suggest that at the elementary level at least, teaching materials must be controlled to the extent that students can feel successful at acquiring some rudimentary communicative skills, such as how to greet people, how to order at a restaurant, how to talk about student daily activities, etc. Intermediate Chinese, on the other hand, may mix controlled materials with less controlled materials. When students reach the Advanced level, fewer controlled or no controlled materials at all can be most beneficial to increasing their language proficiency. We know that the language in highly controlled materials may not often be heard or used naturally by native Chinese speakers, but certainly native speakers can understand it. As far as whether this kind of controlled material is authentic, this may not be the most salient consideration at elementary levels so I will leave it to the reader to decide.

I conclude this section with a note that I once left to my eight-year-old daughter who studied Chinese at a local Chinese weekend school for three weeks.

I took special care to limit the characters used in the note to those she had learned.

She was very proud that she understood the meaning. Is the note authentic?

(2.26) 雁君： 妈妈去学校了。你在家，关门。我二点看你。— 妈妈

Yànjūn: māma qù xuéxiáo le. nĭ zài jiā, guān mén. wŏ liăng diăn kàn nĭ. — māma

[Yànjūn, Mom went school. You stay at home and lock the door. I will see you at 2 o’clock. – Mom]

2.6 Conclusion

Chinese language teachers might not have to determine the content of PGC because the textbooks they choose may have predetermined it for them. The questions are, then, how, to choose a textbook? Is there such a thing as a “good”

textbook or a “bad” textbook? This chapter has discussed many factors relevant to teaching materials. It is suggested that teachers follow the guidelines in selecting their teaching materials. Although textbook compilers and pedagogical specialists may determine the content of PGC, it is teachers themselves who shape and mold it to fit their teaching method and style. The following chapter will discuss in detail another major component of pedagogical grammar — teaching methodology.

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Methodology

3.1 Introduction

The methodology¹ of teaching and learning has been referred to as the pedagogical process (cf. Little 1994: 99), separate from pedagogical content as discussed in Chapter 2. Because of the importance of the pedagogical process, a number of approaches have been generated over the last several decades, among them grammar-translation, audio-lingual, communicative, functional-notional, and proficiency (e.g. Bloomfield 1942; Leech and Svartvik 1975; Krashen 1982;

Ellis 1985, 1997, 1999; Prabhu 1987; Cui 1993; Lantolf 2000; Kumaravadivelu 2003). Each of these approaches was proclaimed at one time or another to be the best for language teaching. Of them, the communicative approach, since its inception has received perhaps the most criticism because its mechanism for teaching and learning opposes all traditional approaches, yet interestingly enough it has become perhaps the most popular approach used in foreign language teaching today. Little (1994: 101–3) points out that the communicative approach

— at one time considered useless for pedagogical purposes because of its lack of focus on grammar and correctness — has gained in popularity in recent years due to a strong consensus that has emerged in favor of a communicative version of pedagogical grammar. This consensus seems to have been reinforced by more research and case studies on the acquisition of various foreign languages (e.g.

Widdowson 1978, Lǚ 1981, Brumfit 1984, Phillipson et al. 1991, Tomlin 1994, Lapkin 1998, Kanno 1999, Ellis and Hooper 2001).

One major issue pertaining to the pedagogical process of Chinese is how teachers can best help students acquire Chinese language competence. Earlier literature on this subject suggests that a number of factors should be taken into consideration in the process of teaching and learning Chinese:

1. Sequencing Factor (cf. Dew 1997, Teng 1998)

STATEMENT: It is derived from the frequency count of occurrence of grammatical elements in speaking and writing.

3

PEDAGOGICAL RATIONALE: The most frequently used grammatical elements should be taught and learned first, whereas the least frequently used elements should be taught last.

2. Autonomy and Simplification Factor (cf. Teng 1997 and 2002) STATEMENT: It encourages teachers and pedagogy specialists to develop a system for Pedagogical Grammar of Chinese (PGC).

PEDAGOGICALRATIONALE: Language practitioners must be able to easily comprehend grammatical elements.

3. Accumulation Factor (cf. Teng 1997, Liu 1998)

STATEMENT: Grammatical elements are explained and practiced from simple brief functions to increasingly more complicated functions in consonance with the progression of students’

proficiency level.

PEDAGOGICAL RATIONALE: Students build a solid and systematic foundation of PGC.

4. Discourse and Pragmatic Factor (cf. Xing 1998, 2000, 2003) STATEMENT: Any grammatical element should be taught in terms of when and why it is used in communication.

PEDAGOGICAL RATIONALE: Students learn how to use grammatical elements in communication.

5. Cultural Factor (cf. McGinnis 1994, Hinkel 1999, Myers 2000, Christensen and Warnick 2004)

STATEMENT: The most complex part of learning to participate in a truly Chinese society lies with the combination of linguistic/grammatical elements and cultural elements, such as gestures, proximity and other aspects of behavior.

PEDAGOGICAL RATIONALE: Without cultural elements, students cannot communicate successfully.

6. Psychological Factor (cf. Titone and Danesi 1985, Gass et al. 1989, Healy and Bourne 1998, Arnold 1999)

STATEMENT: Psychological factors, such as circumstances under which students perform best, should be taken into consideration to enhance learning.

PEDAGOGICALRATIONALE: Different students have different learning abilities. Ignorance of, and ignoring, this fact can lead to pedagogical failure.

7. Motivational Factor (cf. Gardner and Lambert 1972, Samimy and Lee 1997, Wen 1999, Dörnyei and Schmidt 2001)

STATEMENT: Highly motivated students should be taught with a different, yet equally encouraging method than less motivated students.

PEDAGOGICAL RATIONAL: Students with different motivations can all learn Chinese effectively and efficiently.

8. Learning Environment (cf. Bar-Lev 1995, Chao 1997)

STATEMENT: A total immersion language environment requires a different teaching method from an hourly learning environment.

PEDAGOGICALRATIONALE: Students can take advantage of their learning environment.

All eight factors are relevant to the methodology of teaching PGC. Some pedagogy specialists emphasize the sequence of grammatical elements, some prefer an autonomous and simple system in teaching PGC, some propose a cumulative teaching method, some suggest that the teaching of PGC should be centered on discourse pragmatic factors, some believe that the teaching method should vary according to students’ motivation and the learning environment, whereas others focus on cultural and psychological factors in teaching and learning Chinese. The theoretical background and practice preference of these pedagogical specialists determine which factor they will argue for. Clearly, each of these eight factors plays an important role in one or more phase(s) of teaching and learning Chinese. The question that arises is how to integrate these factors into the curriculum design of Chinese language programs and balance them in teaching without overemphasizing one while ignoring the other(s). In the following sections, teaching and learning methods used in both the East (in China) and the West (outside China) will be introduced first, then suggested models will be discussed.