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.