Hi everyone,
I am new here (and to teaching) and I just want to ask you what you think
Can Italian students learn English faster than Chinese students?
And if they can, can you tell me why and where I would go to get some more information (I want to do a Masters later so I am keen to try some serious reading on Linguistics).
Thank you.
can Italian students learn faster than Chinese students?
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tryingtoteach
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:30 am
Re: can Italian students learn faster than Chinese students?
out of curiosity, masters in what?tryingtoteach wrote: I am new here (and to teaching) and I just want to ask you what you think
Can Italian students learn English faster than Chinese students?
And if they can, can you tell me why and where I would go to get some more information (I want to do a Masters later so I am keen to try some serious reading on Linguistics).
Thank you.
Yeah, I'd say between an Italian student and a Chinese student, in the same class with similar work ethic, motivation, and experience, the Italian student would have an easier time with English than the Chinese. The languages are much more similar. English is heavily influenced by Latin-based languages, and oftentimes just the mindset of the languages are similar (and wholly unlike that of an East Asian language). Both have a lot of words that are borrowed from each other or from Latin or Greek. Plus all the Indo-European Atlantic coastal languages evolved together over the years, and share more similarities that way too. I don't know, if you want more information on Chinese or Italian linguistics you can browse around wikipedia..
I suppose Sonya has a point when she points out that the similarities between Italian and English are, in theory, likely to make things easier for the Italian student, so I suppose the answer to the question "Can they learn faster?" is probably "Yes". However, there are so many other factors to take into account that I'd be very reluctant to assume that the an Italian student will progress faster than a Chinese student in the same class, though I take her point about similar work ethic and experience.
Don't forget also that speakers of closely related languages are likely to have more problems with false analogies, false friends, L1 interference and so on, whereas speakers of unrelated languages can start with a clean sheet.
Don't forget also that speakers of closely related languages are likely to have more problems with false analogies, false friends, L1 interference and so on, whereas speakers of unrelated languages can start with a clean sheet.
I think it also depends on what the students know already and what you are comparing. For example, if you had a Chinese student and an Italian student, neither of whom had ever studied any English at all, the Italian student would be ahead of the Chinese student because of the Roman alphabet. I don't know these days if Chinese students are familiar with pin yin (the way to use English letters to write Chinese) or not (some of you who are there may know) but the different writing system and the fact that English (as nuts as it may be) is phonics based are new concepts to Chinese students. Granted, we often get students who are past this point in their learning, but I have had Chinese students who didn't understand the concept, and misspelled "cat" as "cta" for example.
I can also tell you, having studied Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, that learning Spanish was far easier. It took me a year just to feel comfortable with the Russian alphabet, because of its differences from English (and I was older too, so I'm sure that entered into it.) I learned to write some in Chinese, but it faded with disuse, and all that's left is the ability to occasionally communicate with very low students to put them at ease, but with a real fossilized ability.
Hmm...maybe I slipped off topic a bit, but I bet if you took 20 students of each background and matched them for intensity, intelligence, and drive (hah hah try doing that), the Italian group would progress faster at least in the beginning. After a point it would even out.
I can also tell you, having studied Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, that learning Spanish was far easier. It took me a year just to feel comfortable with the Russian alphabet, because of its differences from English (and I was older too, so I'm sure that entered into it.) I learned to write some in Chinese, but it faded with disuse, and all that's left is the ability to occasionally communicate with very low students to put them at ease, but with a real fossilized ability.
Hmm...maybe I slipped off topic a bit, but I bet if you took 20 students of each background and matched them for intensity, intelligence, and drive (hah hah try doing that), the Italian group would progress faster at least in the beginning. After a point it would even out.
lol, the master of irony..lolwhites wrote:"All generalizations are false" - Mark Twain
has anyone here taught Italian and Chinese students?
with the work ethic, experience, and motivation thing.. there's a lot of international students at my uni.. I'm not saying everyone has the same level of intelligence, but I assume there's some selectivity in who gets to be an international student at Berkeley, and I know it's really expensive, so I'd say they're all about similar in motivation and effective work ethic. Experience is kind of up in the air, but I assume there are similar language prerequisites to studying here. And having been to Italy and China, I'd say people in both countries generally don't speak much English.
However, in my experience, the Italian and other European students master English much more readily than the Asian ones. In fact, after about a semester the European int'l students tend to speak excellent English with just a trace of a cool accent. Sometimes you can't even guess where they're from, it's so slight. The Asian ones get by really well, but even after a year or more there are noticeable pronunciation difficulties and some occasional awkwardness in their grammar, and they're just not as adroit in English. Maybe this is because there are tons of natively bilingual Asian-American communities around Berkeley (inhibiting their English practice), and fewer European ones? I don't know.. but I would say it's because of the extreme differences between Asian languages and most European ones.
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tigertiger
- Posts: 246
- Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2005 9:42 am
some parallels to consider.
In my last school (Shanghai) we taught western expats Chinese and English. We also taught Japanese expats English and Chinese.
Jpanese students said that English was hard and Chinese was much easier to learn.
But had little difficulty in writing at their level of language proficiency.
My French, German, Brazilian (speaker of Portugese) and Spanish students all said English was much easier to learn than Mandarin.
Furthermore, all could write competently in English, but none could write in Chinese scripts, altough some could recognise common characters.
In my last school (Shanghai) we taught western expats Chinese and English. We also taught Japanese expats English and Chinese.
Jpanese students said that English was hard and Chinese was much easier to learn.
But had little difficulty in writing at their level of language proficiency.
My French, German, Brazilian (speaker of Portugese) and Spanish students all said English was much easier to learn than Mandarin.
Furthermore, all could write competently in English, but none could write in Chinese scripts, altough some could recognise common characters.
I taught multilingual classes in the UK and frequently had Italians and Chinese in the same class. I'm not sure the Italians necessarily learned faster, they had different problems and different solutions to them.
As far as "work ethic" goes, the situation may have been somewhat skewed by the fact that governmet subsidies made the courses a lot cheaper for students from EU countries; European students payed a few hundred quid at most for a full time course while the Chinese students (or rather, their families) were paying thousands of pounds to sit in the same classroom, which concentrated the latter's minds somewhat.
For more discussion on the difficulties of learning Chinese you might want to check out this tread I started a couple of summer ago:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 9d0002b6fc
As far as "work ethic" goes, the situation may have been somewhat skewed by the fact that governmet subsidies made the courses a lot cheaper for students from EU countries; European students payed a few hundred quid at most for a full time course while the Chinese students (or rather, their families) were paying thousands of pounds to sit in the same classroom, which concentrated the latter's minds somewhat.
For more discussion on the difficulties of learning Chinese you might want to check out this tread I started a couple of summer ago:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 9d0002b6fc
I want to contribute (however minimal it may be) 
:
If other variables are equal, such as literacy in the native language, intelligence, motivation, food on the table, et cetera; then I also say that a novice Italian student would learn English faster than a novice Chinese student for the two big obvious reasons which have already been mentioned: writing system and lexical cognates.
Also, Sonya said
I was curious to hear more about this. Would you elaborate?
:If other variables are equal, such as literacy in the native language, intelligence, motivation, food on the table, et cetera; then I also say that a novice Italian student would learn English faster than a novice Chinese student for the two big obvious reasons which have already been mentioned: writing system and lexical cognates.
Also, Sonya said
oftentimes just the mindset of the languages [latin based] are similar...
I was curious to hear more about this. Would you elaborate?
I can't really explain what I mean by the term mindset, I guess it's just the way "natural" feels in one language, as opposed to another.. but here's an example of what I mean
In -- I study French, not Italian, but these two languages share quite a few similarities so bear with me -- in French, if you want to say
"He speaks English really well"
you would say: "Il parle tres bien anglais." He speaks very well English. there's some difference, but the idea is the same.
however, in Chinese, you would say: "His English language speech's very standard." It's completely different. Note particularly the standard part.. it's also grammatical to say "very good" instead, but people normally don't think of it that way. It's like the thing with the google translator on the I think general discussion thread, if you saw it.
It's much easier to go from a language where "Elle parle tres bien anglais" to one where "She speaks English really well", than from one where "ta de ingyu shuo de hen biao zhun (sp)." True, there are faux amis.. but they're generally in terms of vocabulary, things like how ignorer means to unintentionally not know, not to deliberately not know. Generally, at least with French, I can form novel sentences whose form I didn't study before, and be right. I understand idiomatic phrases, or terms, or structures in French that I would struggle more witih if I only spoke Chinese, because they make sense in English too (but they don't exist in Chinese).. so just flip that around..
In -- I study French, not Italian, but these two languages share quite a few similarities so bear with me -- in French, if you want to say
"He speaks English really well"
you would say: "Il parle tres bien anglais." He speaks very well English. there's some difference, but the idea is the same.
however, in Chinese, you would say: "His English language speech's very standard." It's completely different. Note particularly the standard part.. it's also grammatical to say "very good" instead, but people normally don't think of it that way. It's like the thing with the google translator on the I think general discussion thread, if you saw it.
It's much easier to go from a language where "Elle parle tres bien anglais" to one where "She speaks English really well", than from one where "ta de ingyu shuo de hen biao zhun (sp)." True, there are faux amis.. but they're generally in terms of vocabulary, things like how ignorer means to unintentionally not know, not to deliberately not know. Generally, at least with French, I can form novel sentences whose form I didn't study before, and be right. I understand idiomatic phrases, or terms, or structures in French that I would struggle more witih if I only spoke Chinese, because they make sense in English too (but they don't exist in Chinese).. so just flip that around..
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BeautifulFerret
- Posts: 9
- Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2005 9:30 am
yup
All things being equal, an Italian student will progress faster than a Chinese student, the same way a native English speaker will reach say, intermediate level, much faster in Italian than they will in Chinese.
This little article discusses this mostly from the point-of-view of native English speakers: http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/ha ... nguage.php
This little article discusses this mostly from the point-of-view of native English speakers: http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/ha ... nguage.php
Personally I don't think that pingyin is a very good phonics system. I much prefer BPMF. In this system the phonics are all represented by characters. I can't get to grips with pingyin. There is too much L1 interference on the sounds. The Taiwanese do learn BPMF system in school, but I imagine that they probably don't in the mainland for political reasons. Still it is a much better system although initially a little harder to learn.Lorikeet wrote:I think it also depends on what the students know already and what you are comparing. For example, if you had a Chinese student and an Italian student, neither of whom had ever studied any English at all, the Italian student would be ahead of the Chinese student because of the Roman alphabet. I don't know these days if Chinese students are familiar with pin yin (the way to use English letters to write Chinese) or not (some of you who are there may know) but the different writing system and the fact that English (as nuts as it may be) is phonics based are new concepts to Chinese students. Granted, we often get students who are past this point in their learning, but I have had Chinese students who didn't understand the concept, and misspelled "cat" as "cta" for example.
I can also tell you, having studied Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, that learning Spanish was far easier. It took me a year just to feel comfortable with the Russian alphabet, because of its differences from English (and I was older too, so I'm sure that entered into it.) I learned to write some in Chinese, but it faded with disuse, and all that's left is the ability to occasionally communicate with very low students to put them at ease, but with a real fossilized ability.
Hmm...maybe I slipped off topic a bit, but I bet if you took 20 students of each background and matched them for intensity, intelligence, and drive (hah hah try doing that), the Italian group would progress faster at least in the beginning. After a point it would even out.
Food for thought here:
Through my Masters, I had to research the effects of French in Morocco, Spain, Italy and Vietnam. This also included studying the phonetic and syntaxic problems associated with teaching French in these 4 countries. What I found in these texts was that because Arabic (both Classic and Moroccan dialects), Berber, and Vietnamese were so different from French (than Italian and Spanish), those differences stuck out more to these students. When they got to the higher more advanced levels, their French was almost or as strong as a native speaker's. In Italy and Spain (as Lolwhites pointed out) there was still a dependance on the relationship between L1 and L2. They would tend to manipulate that relationship to speed up the learning process. So students had small common problems like the pronounciation of 'z' instead of 's'. Examples like "Puis j'avoir le poison, s'il vous plait?" at restaurants were far more common ("Can I have the poison please?" instead of fish)
I know there are historical aspects involved with colonisation at play here, but I thought it would still be useful to add this to the discussion.
Through my Masters, I had to research the effects of French in Morocco, Spain, Italy and Vietnam. This also included studying the phonetic and syntaxic problems associated with teaching French in these 4 countries. What I found in these texts was that because Arabic (both Classic and Moroccan dialects), Berber, and Vietnamese were so different from French (than Italian and Spanish), those differences stuck out more to these students. When they got to the higher more advanced levels, their French was almost or as strong as a native speaker's. In Italy and Spain (as Lolwhites pointed out) there was still a dependance on the relationship between L1 and L2. They would tend to manipulate that relationship to speed up the learning process. So students had small common problems like the pronounciation of 'z' instead of 's'. Examples like "Puis j'avoir le poison, s'il vous plait?" at restaurants were far more common ("Can I have the poison please?" instead of fish)
I know there are historical aspects involved with colonisation at play here, but I thought it would still be useful to add this to the discussion.
I'd personally say that Japanese is easier to learn for Chinese students than English, and would guess that English would be easier to learn for Italian students than Chinese. The reason for this is the writing system. Japanese writing evolved from Chinese characters in much the same way English (and Italian if I remember correctly) evolved from Latin. Also certain features will be common to each pair of writing systems: radicals to Chinese and Japanese; and prefixes, suffixes and word roots to Italian and English. (For those unfamiliar with radicals, they are in some ways similar to word roots in English.) Students who have these features in their L1 will already be primed to detect them in L2. For example, I found I could recognise prefixes in French (even though my French was awful.) Recognising Radicals in Chinese is another matter.
Students that I've taught that are native Mandarin or Taiwanese speakers (both use the same writing system) who have studied both Japanese and English tend to say Japanese is easier to learn. They generally find that reading and writting in Japanese are easier than in English.
I also feel it is worth talking about teaching methodology in this discussion. Within English teaching, speaking and listening skills are highly valued; unfortunatley, this is not the case within Mandarin teaching were reading is emphasised. In fact, this is true to the point were I find I can read characters and produce them with the correct stroke order, and tell you what they mean in English but not in Chinese. Interestingly, this is not a problem the Asian students in my class share. I have studied French in a class where all the other students were native Mandarin speakers. I found my speaking ability exceeded everyone else in the class (with one possible exception, but she did work much harder than me.) Also, I could use English to help me understand some new vocabulary while they could not do the same with Chinese. I also found that I was much more comfortable with speaking work than my classmates. I find now that I am studying Chinese, were reading is emphasised, I am much less comortable with the work. I think that the emphasis placed on different skills within teaching may also effect students perceived performance. Chinese speaking students writing performance is generally better than there speaking performance when they are compared to European students. (Although I do not feel that Chinese speaking student's reading performance in English is particularly good, as they are generally to reliant on memorisation and do not do well on skills such as skimming, scanning, and deriving meaning from context. This, perhaps, is related to their L1 language system.)
Students that I've taught that are native Mandarin or Taiwanese speakers (both use the same writing system) who have studied both Japanese and English tend to say Japanese is easier to learn. They generally find that reading and writting in Japanese are easier than in English.
I also feel it is worth talking about teaching methodology in this discussion. Within English teaching, speaking and listening skills are highly valued; unfortunatley, this is not the case within Mandarin teaching were reading is emphasised. In fact, this is true to the point were I find I can read characters and produce them with the correct stroke order, and tell you what they mean in English but not in Chinese. Interestingly, this is not a problem the Asian students in my class share. I have studied French in a class where all the other students were native Mandarin speakers. I found my speaking ability exceeded everyone else in the class (with one possible exception, but she did work much harder than me.) Also, I could use English to help me understand some new vocabulary while they could not do the same with Chinese. I also found that I was much more comfortable with speaking work than my classmates. I find now that I am studying Chinese, were reading is emphasised, I am much less comortable with the work. I think that the emphasis placed on different skills within teaching may also effect students perceived performance. Chinese speaking students writing performance is generally better than there speaking performance when they are compared to European students. (Although I do not feel that Chinese speaking student's reading performance in English is particularly good, as they are generally to reliant on memorisation and do not do well on skills such as skimming, scanning, and deriving meaning from context. This, perhaps, is related to their L1 language system.)