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[LateStarter]

Hi everyone, hope you can give me some advice on the above topic.

I've been asked to respond to the question: what are the challenges I will face teaching Chinese children.

Hope you can help.
Late Starter

[rmcdougall]

Truly? "I can hide my whiskey under my clown costume."

[naturegirl321]

Try posting on the China forum. BUt for me, it's more the parents. They want their kids to be the best, so pressure you. The pressure runs off on the kids and they're cranky and tired from all the extra classes. These might start when the kid is only 2 years old. THink violin, sports, ENglish, math classes

[Laurence]

Obviously most of the challenges which you come up with are going to be true for children everywhere, but perhaps to a larger extent with Chinese children.

'Chinese children' is a rather broad demographic too - think about poor families in the countryside compared to children living within a level of affluence forever beyond us educationalists.

What naturegirl123 said is true for the latter demographic - there is an overlap with Korean parenting there too (in fact, that phenomenon is proportionally far more generalisble in Korea than here in China, land of a billion peasants). Often children's schedules are overloaded with extra studies and there is little time left for play. What free time is left over for this particular type of child is often taken up by time in front of a screen. Perhaps the result of this is that they need a little more encouragement, or maybe more structured scaffolding before they can get the most out of tasks which require creativity and imagination.
I have heard a lot of people talk about Chinese people generally being uncreative, but I think that's a little bitter..
You may also find, by the way, if they play a lot of cooperative computer games online, like world of warcraft or starcraft, that they enjoy working together.

Also,
Cultural references are often very useful in making language meaningful, so a lack of knowledge about:
locally popular singers and other celebrities;
tv shows;
computer games;
etc.
may alienate a teacher from their students.

Also -
Whilst the possible absence of the romantic alphabet in itself is not really a big problem (after all it doesn't take too long to learn, if they haven't done so already for pinyin in their kindergarten), Chinese kids might require a little more work with certain aspects of phonics. For example: depending on where they are from in China, they might need extra practice differentiating between certain consonants, such as the /l/ and /n/ confusion common in Anhui province.
I love teaching phonics and early literacy - it's so logical and systematic, and the progress is easy to measure and track, unlike structural appropriacy!
Other examples which would probably require heavy attention are the voiced and unvoiced 'th' sounds. These sounds are alien to their native language and the children will probably be a) not exposed to the phonemes outside of their English classes b) exposed to incorrect usage of them via other non native English speakers (being replaced by /d/ and /s/), and so will in all likelyhood require persistent correction.



Hmm.. on reflection, you're not going to be able to go into detail like that in the interview are you?

Tell them that the main challenges will be:

a) to get the children to focus on English phonetics as a distinct set of sounds, rather than making English words using sounds from whatever form of chinese they speak

and

b) to get the students in the habit of 'sounding out' new words so that they can decode pronunciation independently.


Please post again and tell us how the interview goes

ok?

and yeah