Understanding Mandarin Teachers’ and
English Pupils’ Beliefs of Chinese Learning and Teaching: A Critical Review
Yang Juan (杨娟)
University of Warwick
Chinese
language teaching in English schools has developed rapidly in the last six years.
Yet in addition to the identified shortage of qualified teachers of Chinese as
a foreign language, other issues prevent the spread of Chinese teaching. The
GCSE examination for Chinese is taken by 1287 students and still less take the
AS and A level (CILT, 2007), which are perceived as much harder than their
European language equivalents (Wang, 2009; Zhang and Li, 2010).
This review argued that there are inherent challenges in learning Chinese for
English speakers. These are caused by the language structures, appropriate
strategies for learning Chinese and pedagogy in England, which are predicated on
European languages. Mandarin is a tonal language with the logographic written
system, learning Mandarin is a completely different experience to
English-speaking learners from learning an alphabetic language. The tones, the
large majority of homophones and the complexity of character orthography, all
require much deeper processing. On the other hand, alphabetic learners of
Mandarin gradually realized that learning Mandarin, especially the characters,
was a daunting task which demands long time effort on memorization and
repetitive practice, yet Chinese as foreign language teachers showed different
perspectives of Mandarin learning from learners. To enable secondary children
to learn Chinese successfully, it is vital to establish the optimum ways to
teach Chinese. These need to build on the linguistic structures, Chinese
learning strategies and ultimately, most appropriate support for language
learning through pedagogy and the curriculum. Moreover, this review argued that
teachers’ and pupils’ understanding of these issues may be the vital component
in making them effective in teaching and learning. The messy patchwork of
knowledge and beliefs from both teachers and students are the underlying
factors which challenge current CFL learning and teaching in the UK. However,
compare to the empirical investigation of Chinese acquisition as a second
language, less attention has been paid so far on teachers and students own thoughts
of Chinese language learning.