An Experimental Approach in Teaching Pinyin at Princeton

  Yin Chong, M.A.

University of Pittsburgh

 

Teaching pinyin has always been a significant and a constant component of the TCFL classroom, especially in the elementary learners’ classroom.  Based on my observations at Brown University and Princeton University, introducing the pinyin system has been the major teaching task for the first two o three weeks of the term (10-20 class hours) without exception.  By introducing pinyin, I refer to four generally followed stages of teaching the pinyin system: consonant, vowel, tone, and combination.  Though my chance to observe more cases might be limited, my experience suggests that 7-10 class hours is the least time required to introduce the pinyin system in most TCFL classrooms.

However, this paper is going to introduce an experimental approach in teaching pinyin that is currently being adopted at Princeton University, which reduces the class hours required to teach pinyin from 10 hours to 3 hours.

 

I taught elementary Chinese at Princeton in fall 2007 and fall 2008.  In fall 2007, our team (consisting of five instructors) used tow weeks (10 class hours) to teach the pinyin system.  This amount of time had been the average time required to introduce pinyin for the past ten years at Princeton.  However, in fall 2008, with an almost identical student body, we reduced the class hours required to teach pinyin from 10 hours to 3 hours.  In other words, we only contributed 3 class hours to introducing the pinyin system.  This revolutionary approach has stirred some suspicion among not only outsiders, but also the members of our teaching team.  Nevertheless, with a semester passed, both my colleague and myself are convinced that this approach is feasible and effective.  The major part of this paper will expound upon the empirical evidence and theoretical groundwork that I use to make this claim.

 

From the cognitive perspective, memory is a central feature of acquiring languages – its very basis.  Cognitive psychologists have proposed a model of working memory in which a controlling attentional system supervises and coordinates a number of subsidiary slave systems.  This interaction termed an articulatory or phonological loop, was assumed to be responsible for the manipulation of speech-based information.  This paper is going to further explore the relationship between memory and this phonological loop, and to link it to language teaching in the TCFL classroom.  I argue that “memory will be enhanced only in a semantic/meaningful context.”  The argument of this paper is that an understanding of how language acquisition works can spur us to reduce the hours of drilling meaningless syllables, instead placing the introduction of pinyin in a meaningful context.

 

Over the process of applying this new approach, I have been witnessing fluctuations in students’ performance where pronunciation is concerned, which can serve as one of the indicators for us to evaluate students’ grasp of pinyin.  However, with a term passed, a overall slight improvement in students’ pronunciation is observed when compared to the two years.  I am also going to use a statistical approach to chart these observations and to analyze them in a cognitive scientific framework.