- What does proficiency approach mean?
In the simplest terms, “proficiency” refers to one's ability to use the language in the appropriate context; therefore, if a teacher is employing the proficiency approach in teaching Chinese, he/she should really focus on developing students’ ability to use Chinese in a variety of real life situations. (Reference: Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction by Judith Shrum and Eileen Glisan)
- What do we mean by student-centered instruction?
In standards-based instruction, the teacher designs various activities for students to work in groups to develop communication skills in three modes: interpersonal, interpretive and presentational. This approach is different from traditional teacher-centered activities where the teacher is the one doing most of the talking in the classroom, while the students quietly work on fill-in-the-blanks worksheets, substitution drills and sentence construction.
- How much Chinese do we use in teaching Chinese?
In any world language class, the teacher should teach in the target language, rather than English, i.e. in a Chinese classroom, the teacher should use Chinese to teach Chinese. According to the updated ACTFL position statements published in 2011, ACTFL recommends that language educators and their students use the target language as exclusively as possible (90% plus) at all levels of instruction during instructional time (ACTFL Position Statements: http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4368#langlearn).
- When do we start teaching Pinyin?
Most teachers do not start teaching pinyin before grade 3 for elementary school students, due to the fact that children in K-3 are still learning the basics of English. Introducing pinyin at these grades could cause students to confuse pinyin with English phonics, thus influencing their Chinese pronunciation. For example, children could get confused by seeing such pinyin as: “ge ge”; “ jie jie”
When planning a lesson or a unit or a course, it is most important to keep the end goals in mind, i.e. what students will be able to know and do at the end of the instruction, whether it is a fifty minute, week, or semester long instruction. Next, the teacher must determine what constitutes acceptable evidence of students’ learning outcomes, i.e. students’ production acceptable by the teacher. Finally, the teacher must design a variety of engaging instructional activities to help students produce the desired outcomes. (Reference: Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe)
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