Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,

I'm tutoring two Chinese students attending an American high school. Should I encourage my students to read about English grammar in Chinese in order to help them understand it. One of them is low intermediate, and the complex terms in grammar are hard to explain given her low vocab in English.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I think it's natural and perfectly valid to seek explanations in one's first language (I own and have availed myself of several grammars written in English in my learning of Mandarin, for example), but I am not sure that I would encourage students of high-school age to do so unless they themselves had been requesting such L1 explanations, and were capable of understanding and appreciating them (it seems hard for many to really warm to "grammar" until they are of say undergraduate age at least). But assuming you or rather they do start making use of such a grammar, try to make sure that it contains authentic examples of actual usage - there are some quite "dry" (unrealistic and hardly functional) if not dodgy bilingual grammars and grammar exercise manuals around, if my experience of them in China and Japan is anything to go by. Something like a bilingualized edition of Michael Swan's Practical English Usage would be good (such are available in Japan at least, with Japanese explanation/where the explanation was English, but English still for the examples obviously, along with an idiomatic Japanese translation of those examples), used in conjunction with say Murphy's Essential/Basic Grammar in Use, or Intermediate Grammar in Use (two in a series of monolingual/English-English grammar exercise books). In further relation to examples, remember also that no matter how good a rule, it will stand or fall (or rather, fail to be fully "realized") if the student doesn't meet a sufficient number of exemplars, so I would recommend that your students get a good bilingualized dictionary in addition to, or even if preference to, a grammar: there are definitely such editions of Longman's Active Study Dictionary, and Oxford's Advanced Learner's Dictionary around - see the following linked threads for further details of bilingualized (as opposed to more traditional/limited "bilingual") dictionaries (what I'm trying to say here is that many bilingual dictionaries are too small and concise, and simply do not provide enough information to enable students to produce language free of "translation errors" etc - again, see the following links).
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 1560#11560
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... light=mlds

Of course. Why not. It is only because ESL is run by impractical windbags that anyone would suggest otherwise (if we are talking theoretical and not motivational issues i.e they might hate the idea). On the other hand, don't expect it to help to solve whatever problems you are having all that much, unless you can read the texts yourself and choose good ones.

Talking of learning Chinese, the following is excellent on grammar (sophisticated without becoming too complicated):
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jMof ... al+chinese

More books (the Routledge titles, and the Li & Thompson, are especially noteworthy):
http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=chinese+grammar

Learning to read and write Chinese:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G8pX ... r=#PPP1,M1
http://www.cjk.org/cjk/dicintro.html
http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-C ... bb_product (actually I think this book's method looks like hard work - more work than it's probably worth doing!)