Reaction: Benny's video two weeks into the challenge.

Tweet Last night Benny put his first video attempt in Mandarin on the web for the world to see... or to use a Chinese phrase I learned yesterday (在眾目睽睽下Benny開口了說出國語)

After speaking Chinese for just two weeks, it is clear that tones are a big focus for him. As well they should be. It will allow him to be understood while speaking to a native speaker who is not a Chinese teacher. I'll talk more about this in another post, but for now I'll just say I think we should all start learning Chinese this way. Don't wait a month or a year to learn tones. Learn them and use them from day one. 

This video has a very raw quality to it. For nearly 10 minutes we watch Benny struggle for every word, trying his best to get the tones right. As he states on his website the video is scripted, translated by his Chinese teacher. No doubt that during the process he also learned everything that we hear him say into the camera, so no need for monkey jokes. 

My big question, however, is how we as language learners (or teachers) should feel about how the video was made. There is no doubt that he is speaking Chinese, and I can understand just about everything he said, but he didn't write the script. In his words: 

"So with that in mind, a couple of days ago I asked my Chinese teacher (I’ve getting private lessons for now) to translate a script with everything I would say if I was giving a tour of my home in a language I speak fluently. I wanted to explain complex things, like that I replaced my laptop with a desktop, that I don’t really use my fridge etc., and she wrote it up for me in Chinese (which I used for the captions) and in pinyin, which I was studying to learn all the new vocabulary, and memorising the lines themselves since then."

For some this is blasphemy, "he is using a teacher, or  "he didn't write the script" they say, but negativity never seemed like a very good way to learn anything, so instead I want to discuss what we might learn from his video.

When we open a text book we are presented with new material. There is a dialogue or maybe even a short essay. After the essay we get a nice word bank (with further examples if we are lucky) and a section on grammar. Some of us memorize that material.  That is essential what Benny did, he memorized the textbook, only he also helped write the textbook... or script rather. While this video may not be his own words (or at least the Chinese) yet he now has a pretty good understanding of how to talk about: time, location, distance, direction etc. He can also tell people why he can or can't do something (因為....所以).

Okay, now for my point. Sometimes when learning a language we need to memorize things. We can't do it passively, cause that is a huge waste of time, but we should do it actively, taking sentences or phrases and committing them to memory. However, we can't stop there. Once we have the phrase (or sentence) we need to make it our own, by swapping out nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. to create new strings of communication, sort of like what I did at the start of this blog. The phrase 眾目睽睽 isn't my own, but through the active process of studying it, understanding it, and committing it to memory, I learned how to use it.

I'm sure that Benny will be a lot more comfortable "in the wild" now that he understands everything he said in the video. Even if he can't create sentences of his own using some of the grammatical phrases (yet), he will be able to understand them in reading and listening when they come up.

This  in Chinese is called 語言定式教學法, a sort of formulaic speech teaching method and I find it quite effective. I've wrote roughly about how it works in a classroom setting in a past entry called Stuff the Duck.

I would love to hear all your thoughts, so please post them below.

Self-study with online materials

Tweet It's no surprise that digital technology has revolutionized our access to information. In the area of language acquisition this means that we have more ways to study than ever. Researchers in the field of educational technology (Beatty 2004, Blin 2004, et al.) find technology as a great way for students to find information that fits their own individual learning styles and abilities. Unlike even the best student centered classroom activities, digital technology (for education) creates "student-initiated, self-managed interactive learning by students at their own pace" (Kubler 2011).

Digital technology is the ever "patient" provider of content. No matter how many times we replay a Youtube video, or hit next on a flashcard program, we will always be the first to call it quits at the end of the day. Now, more than ever, we can access information that is relevant to our needs, and (hopefully) increase our language output. While this instant access to information may be a wonderful thing, it is important that we find out ways to effectively use the digital technology (in this case online materials) as a study tool.

So how do we go about self-study with online materials? To begin to answer this question I've adapted some information from Cornelius Kubler's article titled "Promises and Perils of Educational Technology in Foreign Language Curriculum and Materials Development" with a typical ChinesePod lesson (covering dialogue, vocabulary, expansion, and exercise).

Step 1: Get in the zone.
Regardless of what kind of online material or digital technology you are using, it is important to dedicate focus and concentration on the task at hand. As recently mentioned on Lingomi's blog multitasking isn't the way to go about studying (especially listening skills). While the Internet is rampant with Podcasts and mobile learning apps, there is a lot of research out there to suggest that multitasking while trying to study is a serious impairment on our ability to learn. Therefore, even before you are ready to study the latest lesson, get yourself mentally prepared. Turn off Facebook, step away from Twitter, and find a quite place to focus on whatever it is you are trying to learn.

Step 2: Listen to (or read) the new material (more than once).
Listen to the dialogue for a ChinesePod lesson two or three times. Don't be concerned if there are things you don't understand. The goal of this step is to familiarize ourselves to the general context and new linguistic material. Don't look-up new words, or pause the dialogue if you are getting lost. Instead find out what information you can gather from the dialogue.
(For a typical ChinesePod lesson this step should take about 5 minutes).

Step 3: Drill the lesson.
Now it is time to read the dialogue (closely). Check the words that you didn't understand during step two, but be sure to check them in context. Read the sentences over and over, repeating them out loud until until you can repeat them back in a fast manner. The more you practice saying sentences or vocabulary words, the more natural they will come out when you are actually trying to use them in a real situation. Listening (or saying) a word or sentence once simply isn't enough.
(This could take about 20 minutes... even more if you are focusing on how to write the Characters, but you need to take the time if you actually want to learn, and be able to use the materials)

Step 4: Study the notes (or listen to the entire lesson).
Now that the vocabulary and sentence patterns are familiar, it is time to actually listen to the entire ChinesePod lesson. If you have done step two and three, you should find that the words in Chinese are no longer foreign to you, and you will be able to benefit from the English explanation of a particular word or grammar pattern and its usage. Think of this as the lecture portion of a class. You don't get much out of a lecture if you haven't done the homework beforehand.
(For a typical ChinesePod lesson this section will take 15 minutes)

Step 5: Expand on the material.
Now that you have heard the new material multiple times it is time to check out any expansion material that has been provided. In the case of ChinesePod this means looking at the key grammar patterns or vocabulary words from the lesson. Read through each of the expansion sentences (out loud), thinking about the meaning. Try and make your own sentences (which you can post in the discussion section) to see if you real understand the material. Ideally, you should memorize any vocabulary or grammar pattern that you find necessary. As Kubler states: memorization "is a very important step," which "firmly establishes in your brain the sounds and structures of the language for you to drawn on later in your own speech."
(Expansion materials and working on new sentences could take around 15 minutes)

Step 6: Test you mastery.
In the case of ChinesePod this means doing the exercises. Now that you have the vocabulary memorized, you've listened to the dialogue, and you understand the grammar patterns, this should be a breeze, after you have crushed the test, mark the lesson as studied... and really mean it!
(A set of exercise drills should take 5 minutes)

What I am suggesting in this post, is taking the time to turn online materials into your own sort of virtual classroom. If you follow all six steps, you'll have spent an hour fully learning the materials that you set out to study. This might not be something that you can do everyday, and you certainly can't do it on the bus or while you're working, but if you are conscious and active in your learning approach you will ultimately get more out of it. 

Confucius, in The Analects, is quoted as saying "工欲善其事，必先利其器 (Gōng yù shàn qí shì, bì xiān lì qí qì 'If a craftsman wants to do a good job, he must fist sharpen his tools.' It is important to have the right tools and to "sharpen" them, but we also need to know that these tools only help us do a job, we are still the ones who need to go out and do it.

“填鸭式” (tiányāshì): Stuff The Duck

Tweet After a two month hiatus I'm glad that I can get back to blogging. The past two months have been incredibly busy, with a lot of life changing things going on. In late May I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Just a week later I took a road trip across America, helping my girlfriend take all her belongs to Fremont, California, where she started her residency program. A week after that I was China bound. For the past 4 weeks I have been living in Beijing, China and studying at Central University for Nationalities（中央民族大学）.

I am currently attending Associated Colleges in China (ACC) K-12 Chinese Teachers Training Program, a six week long summer training program dedicated to increasing proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, while simultaneously attending lectures and discussion labs that are focused on how to effectively teach Mandarin Chinese. I am blessed to have a wonderful group of fellow students (who also happen to be Chinese teachers during the school year) with me on the program. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the ACC Summer Programs, they are know for their incredibly high expectations of students, and their blazing fast pace. The average student who attends ACC's six week program will cover roughly one year of college level Chinese.

Before I started the program, I was curious as to how the students and teachers are able to achieve so much in so little time. After the first hour of class I found out, they "stuff the duck," or as we say in Mandarin 填鸭式 (tiányāshì). For two hours of class we become Chinese learning robots, mimicking our teacher's every sentence pattern. While the original form of 填鸭式  has fallen under a lot of scrutiny due to its apparent inability to clearly teach "why" something is the way it is, that is not my take for learning a foreign language. After over three weeks in ACC's Summer Program I would say that it is an effective tool for learning Chinese. And here is why:

• In a class setting it allows for maximum repetition of target language goals.

• It forces language learners to use new grammar patterns to express their opinions (over and over and over again)

• After a single student is done saying the sentence every other student is forced to repeat (again) the sentence, thus maximizing the students ability to listen to new sentence patterns as well as speak them. 

The above is only possible because the teacher has complete control over the lesson plan, and what  students are allowed to say. For the past three weeks I have not be able to truly express my own opinion in the classroom unless it strictly pertained to the topic we were covering. Because of the structure of the class students are able to hear sentence patterns and new vocabulary at least 80 times during the course of the two hours. Of course, I also have another two hours of class a day where I can freely speak about the topics we are discussion, but of course the use of newly learned grammar patterns and vocabulary is ideal.

Assuming that students do their part outside of class to review materials studied during the day, it is a rather successful way of teaching a language. Of course, my program is geared toward this style of teaching. And, although I'm living in Beijing, I haven't had much time to get away from campus to do any exploring, I'm simply too busy studying all the time (grumble, grumble).

While it has been hard work the results are staggering. I can feel my Chinese constantly growing stronger and my grasp of the grammar points and vocabulary words is quite strong. Although, that might also be related to the 10+ hours that I have put in on Anki since my arrival in China, and the language pledge that we signed at the beginning of the program. Regardless, I feel a strong command over roughly 500 new vocabulary words related to effectively teaching Chinese.

If anything, this has been the prefect way to prepare for graduate school in Taiwan.