月儿高又高

The Moon is high

The leaves are green

The river flows

Flows to the sea

刮风了

我的布娃娃

泥娃娃 A Clay Doll

Learning Mandarin will put children off

It’s not easy being a parent in 2010. As well as all the other things fathers and mothers feel obliged to do for their children — coaching to get into the right school, learning an instrument, dance classes, computer skills (as if they needed it) another “must” has been added: Mandarin.

China will soon be the most powerful economy in the world. To survive, Top People will have to speak the language. On your bike, Mum. Find a suitable tutor and take up your child’s only remaining free evening in the week.

Head teachers like me are feeling the pressure to supply more Mandarin lessons rather than pedestrian French and German. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, wants every secondary school pupil to have the right to learn Mandarin alongside the 231 other things the Government has decided it’s essential for children to grasp this week.

Everyone needs to calm down. Mandarin shows all the signs of being the educational equivalent of swine flu: genuinely important but, so far, massively hyped. The truth about Mandarin is surprisingly complex. I have to declare an interest. On one of the first educational exchanges with mainland China several years ago with two Manchester schools, we were urged to learn some simple phrases. The well-meaning leader of the team put in a year’s work. In his speech to the local welcoming committee he thought that he was saying thank you, but appeared instead to have compared the senior local dignitary to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

BACKGROUND
Mandarin will stretch our children
Labour: primaries to teach Arabic and Mandarin
Teenagers have better things to learn than Mandarin
Mandarin - no easy option
Mandarin is fiendishly difficult. Many schools have horrendous drop-out rates. The real danger is that we burn children’s fingers and put them off not just Mandarin but languages in general, when a more gentle immersion might have let them stand the heat in the kitchen.

A kinder way to introduce Mandarin might be not to make it compulsory, but to have it as a club in school, sweetening the pill of a demanding language by talking about Chinese culture, food and history. We don’t just need to speak to the Chinese: we need to understand them.

Mandarin is different from other languages. The conventional skills that enable children to pick up French or German don’t help. Those who take to it best aren’t linguists, but musicians. Our system likes to compartmentalise subjects, and few schools have a crossover between music and Mandarin. Yet it might prove the richest source of recruitment. There is also a very practical objection to GCSE Mandarin. Whether head teachers, parents and pupils like it or not, A* grades are increasingly influential in deciding whether a candidate gets an offer at a UK “Ivy League” university. The lion’s share of A*s in Mandarin will inevitably go to native speakers. Any universities adviser meeting a clever child who hasn’t heard Mandarin spoken round the table would feel nervous about suggesting it as a GCSE. However hard non-native speakers try, they will find it hard to excel.

Two university tutors have told me that they would prefer students to start Mandarin at university. They argue that there is a shortage of good teachers of Mandarin in Britain, and that too many students who learnt it at school have been taught badly. They also believed that the challenge of the new language was better handled by someone that bit older.

A Chinese saying (it would be, wouldn’t it?) states that we always educate children for the world we lived in, not the one they will live in. It is absolutely right to recognise that our young people will benefit greatly from more knowledge of another language. With Mandarin the issue is not whether we do it, but how.

Another suggestion is to develop an alternative qualification. Let native speakers colonise the GCSE. The Government could pioneer a series of diplomas, like piano grades, in Chinese studies that would mix language with culture and history.

Teaching of formal Mandarin could be postponed until the sixth form, when students are mature enough to cope, and sign up for it because they want to — not because their parents or the Secretary of State think that it’s a good idea.

Chinese Textbook Material from Singapore MInistry of Education

http://xuele.edumall.sg

This website contains all Chinese textbook material used by the Singapore Ministry of Education. The materials range from primary one to secondary four with text, audio, graphics and video in a very user friendly and interactive way.

http://xuele.edumall.sg

Chinese Language in the classroom

Expert Nan Cheng tutors the Hamilton School children in the Mandarin Chinese language

CHILDREN at a north-east school are delving into the mysteries of the Orient as they learn the finer points of Mandarin Chinese.

With the language set to become a major force in the global economy over the coming years, pupils at the independent Hamilton School in Queen’s Road, Aberdeen, have been learning it in addition to Spanish and French.

The classes are run by the school’s languages teacher, Catherine Hunter, who is half French and half Spanish and worked previously in south-east Asia.

Additional Mandarin expertise is provided by Nan Cheng, who also works in the IT department at the school.

Mandarin was originally the language spoken by Chinese officials, most of whom came from Beijing.

Today Mandarin is the main language of government, the media and education in China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages in Singapore.

Globally there are about 870million Mandarin speakers, with just over 53% of the population of China able to speak it. Written Chinese is based on spoken Mandarin and speakers of other varieties of Chinese have to learn the grammar and vocabulary of Mandarin in order to read and write in Chinese.

School principal Kathlyn Taylor said: “Children are so receptive to language and languages and there is no better time to broaden their linguistic horizons than when they are young.

“The value of learning other languages at a young age is extremely significant. It makes them so much more aware of their own language. It fuels their thirst for knowledge of other people and places and it is an invaluable tool when they are older both professionally and socially.”

Learning Mandarin is particularly an asset for the future with the likelihood that more and more commercial opportunities will be opening up in China and with Chinese companies.

While Mandarin may be one of the main global languages in years to come – the school runs both Mandarin and Spanish clubs – it also places great store on traditional languages such as French which is part of the curriculum.

Catherine Hunter said: “From the age of three in the Hamilton School’s pre-school department, children learn French through songs and rhymes. We offer a wide range of learning activities.

“Morning greetings, in the car park, corridors and playground are in French and even the parents join in. The children have an hour per week and year six and seven, two hours of intensive learning, often challenging but always enjoyable.

“Last year, we won two national competitions organised by the Institut Francais d’Ecosse (the French Institute).

“For Lire en Fete (France’s annual literature festival) the children wrote and illustrated a superb story book entitled Le Petit Prince en Ecosse in which they were telling the famous little prince about Scotland and won the first prize.”

The school also won the French prize at Rencontres Theatrales, which is a series of drama competitions organised by the French Institute.

She added: “For the past two years, we have organised a series of workshops in order to celebrate International Language Day.

“Recently we had exciting classes such as Polish, Spanish, Mandarin and Chinese calligraphy, English sign language and Salsa dancing.

“The children researched and created posters about Spain, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Greece, Russia, Nigeria and Egypt. We had an art exhibition as the young children learned about Matisse. Older ones created bear statues as they have in Berlin and made wire statues Giacometti-style.

“Children have the ability to learn languages easily and develop competences so that they can understand and communicate easily, becoming global citizens.”