In January I got my hands on a book called 《现代汉语声调结构词汇》or “Modern Chinese Tone Composition Vocabulary”. This book is unique in that it organises words by their tone patterns rather than their spelling. It also has some handy statistics at the back, gleaned from the words contained within.
There are three main sections in the book. The first and largest (431 pages) contains examples of disyllabic words for all 20 possible tone combinations. That is 4 possible tones for the first syllable and 5 possible tones for the second with the inclusion of the neutral tone or 轻声. Most words in Chinese are disyllabic, by some estimates as many as 65%
The next section contains 3 character words and phrases. Although there are 5 times as many possible combinations of tones (4 first syllable, then 5 each for second and third syllable), there are not as many vocabulary items in this section, which only takes up just over 100 pages.
The last section contains 4 character words and phrases and, although adding another character gives 5 times as many combinations as the previous section, only takes up about 120 pages. This is partly because of the 500 possible tone combinations, 171 don’t have any entries. Looking through the statistics later on, I found that every one of these 171 combinations contained at least one neutral tone.
Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I like to think of myself as a reflective practitioner; a teacher who thinks about his practice and uses the thinking to improve what happens in the classroom, and therefore the outcomes of his students. This week has really kicked the reflection into overdrive like never before.
A professional development program coupled with a self-initiated investigation of the (now more than 20 year old) Australian Language Levels (ALL) Guidelines have made me examine my practice from the root to the tip.
I’m taking part in a 1 year long professional development course called LOTEHAT 3. The acronym “LOTEHAT” takes my least favourite acronym (Languages Other Than English) and adds an element of narcissism (Highly Accomplished Teachers) to arrive at a suitably silly-sounding term. The program itself, however, is far from silly or encouraging of self-aggrandisement. Indeed, the process of looking at my practice from a higher altitude has been very humbling and worthwhile. And it’s only just beginning.
It’s run by the MLTAV and has two major components. The first is a thorough reflection on the “Professional Standards for Accomplished Teaching of Languages and Cultures“, devised by the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Associations in 2005. The second component is a piece of action research designed to investigate and improve one area of classroom practice.
The Standards themselves provide a description of best practice for language teachers and their programs, coupled with questions for teacher reflection to achieve these aims. There are also language-specific notations for seven languages. Luckily, Chinese is one of them, and the annotations are both comprehensive and appropriate.
Over two days, we began to look at some of the Standards and to discuss and think about what their implications were for our practice. Although I did identify some areas that I feel quite confident in, the real value is in finding where I really need to improve.
I decided to double down on the big picture thinking about my practice by reading “Pocket ALL: A User’s Guide to the Teaching of Languages and ESL” by David Vale, Angela Scarino and Penny McKay as well. Although over 20 years old, the ALL Guidelines are still extremely relevant to language teaching practice today. Comprehensive and integrated, the guidelines provide models for thinking about curriculum, resources, teaching and learning. The only factor seriously affected by the date of publication is the neglect of ICT, but that can be quite readily integrated with the models.
I can’t wait to see what comes out of this big picture thinking, identifying and plugging gaps. I feel daunted but excited about the possibilities.
It’s gonna take a while to put this jigsaw together!
This week I have been inspired by some talks I heard.
The first was Robert Steven Kaplan in a Leaders@Google talk here. He was talking about leadership in business, but I got two good ideas in that talk which I can apply to my work. The first was that there should be an agreement about a vision of what you want to do. The second was identifying three key domains which were necessary to achieve the vision.
I know. It’s all a bit new-age sounding, or corporate BS sounding. But I did stop for a moment and think about what are the three areas I need to think about as a teacher.
I came up with “delivery, organisation and assessment and feedback”. When I revisited it a little while later, I noticed the assumptions embedded in the first of those, delivery. So I changed it to “facilitation”. My goal is to move my teaching in that direction.
This thinking about higher goals and objectives coupled with listening to the audiobook of Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. lead me to start asking the question: What is one small, trivial thing I could do to improve in one of these areas? The area that I settled on was feedback (反馈).
If I’m going to move my teaching to a more constructivist style, I need to know more about my students’ experiences and desires. I want to do this with a minimal amount of fuss, both for the students and me. I set up a one-question survey on my school’s portal. Students are asked what they would like to learn more about.
I was so tempted to add more questions, but I won’t until the students are used to regularly answering the one question. I really like the idea of small ideas and small questions. It seems to be pretty powerful stuff. I think I’ve been looking for the One Big Answer to all of it, whereas there are lots of small questions that can change behaviour.
You can help me too with your feedback on feedback. 🙂
I teach in a school with IWBs or Interactive Whiteboards. My school has a junior school and a senior school, and in the junior school, the word is that the teachers and students use the IWBs a lot more.
My own anecdotal research (ie I asked some staff members and students) seems to suggest that in the senior school, the IWBs are not getting quite the workout that they should be. Most teachers I talked to seemed to use the IWBs as projection screens for the most part.
So what is going on here? Why has one section of the school seemingly embraced the technology and another failed to. I’m not sure. It might be the demographics; the junior school teachers are younger on average. It might be the shift in academic focus from the exploratory junior year levels to the assessment-driven senior years.
My recent suggestion to a person higher up in the school hierarchy – that we use the expertise we already have in the school to train those less familiar with IWB technology – was rejected outright on the basis that they weren’t very useful in the senior year levels.
I have used the handwriting recognition with Chinese characters to good effect. You have to write the characters correctly the first time, because the recognition is pretty unforgiving and if students try to fix a character they’ve written, it counts as another stroke and becomes unrecognisable.
Another use I like is taking a student’s work or another text and annotating it. It’s useful for students to see what I look for in a good piece of writing and have discussion about what’s good.
There is the danger that these sort of school investments will be “technology led” and not “education led”, and I think in my school’s case, that is what’s happened, although I think there’s a certain amount of “keeping up with the Jones’s led”. Other schools have the tech, so we get the tech…
I’ve always said that buying the physical infrastructure of these types of things is easy. But it’s what you do with it that matters. And if the majority of staff are ignorant, untrained and disinterested, there’s a pretty high barrier to meaningful engagement with the technology. We have to see what’s possible, we have to learn how to do it, and we need to see a benefit.
If you’ve been teaching for 20 or 30 years without it, it’s easy to understand why you might be resistant. For some of the rest of us, it’s all about small forays into using it, armed with the knowledge that temporary setbacks might not mean total defeat.
Making this was kinda fun. And also challenging.
But it helped me clarify one area of real cognitive dissonance in my teaching practice; although I’m philosophically sympathetic to constructivist theory, particularly because it’s how I learned myself, putting into practice in the classroom is really hard for me! Putting this Prezi together helped me clarify some reasons why. It’s not pretty, but it helped me think about some questions I need to ask. And that’s better than getting answers, right?
I found Prezi very intuitive. I’ve been a fan for a while, but this was my first serious attempt to use it.
I get my Year 7s to make a powerpoint about their family. I might try this next time. Maybe I could teach them how to use it in Chinese. My year 8s could use it to do their cultural projects. The idea that they could share their work with the wider world (other than just their teacher) might make it more interesting for them.
If students make content about their interests, their motivation will be higher and they’ll learn language they need. Not everyone has guinea pigs. Not everyone is a competition horse rider. But it matters a lot to those kids that are to be able to express themselves.
To understand student-centred learning, it’s useful to think about what its opposite is.
Much language methodology is still teacher-centred. Part of the reason, I think, is that this kind of methodology is what the teacher received when they themselves were studying language.It certainly was the case with me. I studied four languages in high school and Chinese at university and it was all teacher-centred.
So part of the challenge for teachers is to teach in a way that they themselves aren’t used to and may not have been exposed to in any meaningful way, for any appreciable length of time.
So what is teacher-centred learning? It’s where the teacher is the sole decision-maker about what is to be learned and how it is to be assessed. The teacher is seen as the conduit to knowledge, or as the person passing down information.
On the other hand, in student-centred learning, the students themselves actively make decisions about what they need to know and seek out knowledge. They are also involved in decisions about how work should be assessed. This can lead to higher student motivation, improved communication amongst learners and between learners and their teachers and improved responsibility for their own work.
The proponents of student-centred learning believe that the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs that learners bring with them into the classroom should be taken into account and used to promote learning.
ICT can assist in student-centred learning by providing access to information which students can access independently and at their own pace. It also gives them chances to present their findings and themselves in different ways.
That’s not to say that activities that involve ICT are inherently student-centred. The test is to what degree students have a say in what they learn and how they present that information.
I really like Google Docs and I use it already. I don’t have to do a lot of collaborative writing, but I think I could use it for a few things. For a start, I have my students using Skritter for learning characters but there’s no good way to see which username is attached to which student, so I have to find out manually. Rather than getting students to email me their usernames, I should have them all edit a single document or use a form.
I could also use it to create exams or tests with colleagues. OK, so not very creative, but certainly better that emailing different versions back and forth.
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