Category Archives: Parents’ Involvement in Chinese Learning

How to Help My Child If I Do Not Know Chinese? (III) – Flashcard

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Children from our elementary program get Chinese flashcards every week. They review the cards with their parents to reinforce what they have learned at school. How to go through Chinese flashcards with children at home? Is there anything that parents should always bear in mind?

First, change the method of going through flashcards with your child from time to time. For example, for the flashcard “苹果 (apple),” you can show your child the Chinese characters and let him/her read out, or you can mix all the flashcard together and let him/her find the “apple” for your, or you can read the Pinyin for “apple” and ask him/her to find the card. By making this a game, you will find that children are not easy to get bored even if they are practicing the same vocabulary.

Second, make the practice short but frequent. For example, you can spend three minutes going through the flashcards with your child before snack time, another three minutes before he/she takes the bath, and another three minutes after he/she wakes up from the nap. Also, always give him/her something new. For example, if we have ten flashcards in total, review five of them with your children on the first day, and replace one of them with a new one the second day. By doing this, little by little, your child will amaze you how much he/she progresses.

Third, always stop before your child gets bored. You should be aware when he/she wants to stop, and stop before that. Therefore, they will look forward to next time’s practice. This “Stop Beforehand” principle does not only apply to flashcard learning, but it is true for all human beings at all stages of development.

All the points above are simple and you may find them easy to be applied into your flashcard review at home. You can really help your child embark on a new journey through language!

Also refer to our previous blogs:

How to Help My Child If I Do Not Know Chinese (I)

How to Help My Child If I Do Not Know Chinese (II)

 

 

 

 

 

-Chinese with Meggie Language School, Austin, Texas

Does Learning More Than One Language Make a Late-Talker?

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It seems to be a common belief that a baby begins talking later if he/she is learning a second language, and even later with a third one. King and Mackey have been talking about this popular misconception in their book “The Bilingual Edge” and found a reason for this prevalent myth: there is a great deal of variation in when children begin to speak. One child may utter the first word as early as eight months or as late as sixteen months. In other words, in any given group, children vary greatly in when to begin talking. However, if a bilingual child has a late start, the fact that the child is exposed to two languages is mostly blamed for his/her late first word.

So does learning more than one language make a late talker? In order to answer the question, in 1992, three scholars from University of Miami carried out a research which compared the lexical development of bilingual children and monolingual children (Pearson, Fernandez, Oller, 1993.) In this later widely-quoted study, they compared between 25 English-Spanish bilingual children and 35 English monolingual children ranging from 8-month to 30-month in age. The parents of the children were asked to complete questionnaires concerning the vocabulary their children could say. The result showed that bilingual children develop the same capacity in vocabulary development in both languages and they were almost in the same pace with monolingual children’s vocabulary development. In other words, there were no significant differences between bilingual children and monolingual children in their paces of accumulating new words.

Therefore, it is natural that children differ in their pace of language development. Being exposed to a second language does not impede children’s development in their first one. If language delay really occurs to a child, blaming bilingualism for language delay can block parents from seeing a variety of other reasons which may be responsible for the problem.

Note:
Pearson, B., Fernandez, S., Oller, D., 1993. Lexical Development in Bilingual Infants and Toddlers : Comparison to Monolingual Norms. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=adjunct_sw

King, K., Mackey, A., 2007. The Bilingual Edge. Harper Collins: New York

 

 

 

 

 

-Chinese with Meggie Language School, Austin, Texas

When Team Teaching Meets Language Classroom…

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Early childhood educators tell us that children’s ears are highly sensitive in distinguishing sounds. And from our own experiences, language learning is not right if the learner can only understand his/her teacher’s talking. That’s how “team teaching” came to our mind. In team teaching, a group of instructors cooperate with each other in achieving the learning goal of students. The first hour of the class can be taught by one teacher, while the second hour will be taught by another. While teachers make sure the 2-hour class design is still a coherent whole, this teaching type involves variability.

Chinese with Meggie teachers have been trying this teaching model a little bit with our students, but we plan to make it systemized from the coming fall semester. Here is how we think about it.

Most apparently, team teaching means that children will have the opportunities to meet and work with different teachers. In general, it expands children’s life experience. Specifically in the field of language learning, it exposes students to different ways of speaking and communication in target language. Even though we set up general standards in what Chinese words/phrases/sentences we use with our students in classroom, each individual still talk differently by nature. To take the English acquisition as an example, when learning English, children hear the language with huge amount of variability influenced by gender, dialect, age and emotional state. But our children learn to adjust to the variability in English.

Therefore, in our Chinese class, with team teaching, such differences in English are made possible for our little Chinese learners. We make sure that our students can understand Chinese, but not “my beloved Chinese teacher’s Chinese.”

-Chinese with Meggie Language School, Austin, Texas