Mandarin

We've been working with Sally Fox at San Diego County Office of Education to learn more about supporting our students who are beginning and intermediate Mandarin Chinese second and/or third language learners. It can be a very tricky language for us native English speakers. Did you know...There are five different tones in Mandarin Chinese? You can get in a lot of trouble by simply saying the word "ma". Say it one way, and it means "mom", and say it with a different tone, and it could mean "horse".  Not only is it difficult for native English speakers to say words using the falling and rising tones, but it's really hard for us to hear and identify them. Sally Fox has come up with a great color-coding system to use when writing pinyin or characters. A certain color means the word needs a rising or falling tone. She also uses TPR as she teaches students move their right hand in the direction of the tone. Lift hand with a rising tone. Lower hand with a falling tone, etc. 

Another reason Mandarin Chinese can be so challenging is there is no transfer between the written alphabets. Many educators help learners by using pinyin. Pinyin is a phonetic system for transcribing Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. They use letters with symbols to indicate the tones. 

What I am learning is second language educators teaching Chinese have to develop an extremely wide repetoire of second language learning strategies. It can take approximately five times as long for a native English speaker to learn Mandarin Chinese. To keep things fresh and engaging for beginning and early intermediate learners the teacher must design lessons using multiple strategies to provide comprehensible input in a variety of contexts in order to learn even the most basic vocabulary. It is believed that second language learners require up to 80 times hearing, speaking, viewing and/or interacting with or using a given word before acquisition takes place. 

It's been fascinating to begin to understand and appreciate how Mandarin Chinese learners begin to acquire the language and the need to support our second language teachers with extensive training on language acquisition strategies and pedagogy. 

Be sure to check out the support resources for world language on the San Diego County Office of Education website. Also visit WestEd to learn more about current research on second language acquisition.