Engage American Adults in Learning Chinese as a
Foreign Language
Minmin Fan
The development of Chinese language in the
Just as the demand for Chinese language programs
is growing across the country, Chinese language teachers are exposed to a host
of challenges: How to prepare American learners to reach sophisticated levels
of proficiency in Chinese? What are the learners’ expectations? What do they want
and need to be able to do in Chinese? What do I want the learners to be able to
do in Chinese? How do I structure things so that the learners develop the
ability to do those things?
Unlike students in K-12 programs, adult learners
generally have more concerns about family, jobs, money, transportation,
fatigue, and other realistic and practical issues. All these factors might
inhibit their full engagement in class. Therefore, teachers of adults learning
Chinese as a foreign language often find themselves obliged to compete with
more demands on learners’ attention: What is an adult learner’s motivation to
engage? What should the instructor do to keep the adult learner motivated and
engaged? How can an American adult effectively and efficiently learn Chinese? What
should an American adult do inside and outside of the classroom to improve his
literacy levels in Chinese?
This paper is to investigate how to promote
learning engagement when teaching American adults who learn Chinese as a
foreign language. This paper will commence by examining the trend of learning
Chinese in the