I can read, write, speak, and listen comfortably on a range of topics in Chinese.
Six years ago I began conducting the greatest action research project of my life. In my early 40s and with zero prior knowledge, I determined I would learn Mandarin Chinese. My purpose was to learn from firsthand experience what works and what does not work for learning a new language in order to help me grow as a high school teacher and college instructor. This was not my first experience learning a new language. In my 20s I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Barcelona Spain. Later, as a high school teacher, I taught physical science and biology in Spanish at a bilingual high school in eastern Washington. Having achieved a high degree of proficiency in Spanish in a few years, I had no doubt I could do it again. My goal was to become professionally proficient in Mandarin in five years. Now, nearly six years later, I have achieved a solid low-intermediate proficiency. I am officially an L-ChL or Long-Term Chinese Learner. I can read, write, speak, and listen comfortably on a range of topics in Chinese, but I have a long way to go before I can engage with authentic native materials in a professional environment. If you go by number of characters, I have about one third of the language I need to comfortably read a newspaper in Mandarin. Even though my timeline has been substantially extended, I am at precisely the level I need to be to learn what it takes to achieve escape velocity from the intermediate plateau. The value of this experience to my professional learning as a teacher of multilingual learners is immeasurable.
I have about one third of the language I need to comfortably read a newspaper in Mandarin.
Two methodologies have really stood out as effective approaches in my experience learning Mandarin: Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) and extensive reading. Most K-12 educators have never heard of these approaches because they are associated exclusively with the most neglected teaching discipline in the US–World Languages. I was especially impressed with the work of Terry Waltz, a Chinese teaching consultant and expert on TPRS instruction. TPRS takes stories from everyday life and turns them into totally comprehensible language learning tools. Through pre-teaching vocabulary (including using primary language), visuals (images, drawings, gestures, realia), and lots of repetition through a process called “Circling”, the teacher facilitates the creation of a story by the class. These stories come from everyday experiences and are often silly, even bizarre. The result is learners walk away from the experience understanding virtually every word of input. Teachers then recycle the vocabulary and structures to create graded reading materials. By narrowing the scope of the corpus and emphasizing high frequency language, comprehension is maximized and language acquisition is accelerated. The combination of totally comprehensible listening and engagement with extensive reading is astoundingly effective.
As a language learner I am incredibly frustrated by “kinda comprehensible” input. Even as a highly motivated adult learner, nothing shuts me down more quickly than a constant barrage of partially understood messages.
So my question is: Are there lessons to be learned from these methods that could help improve content instruction and language acquisition for students? My answer is yes! As a language learner I am incredibly frustrated by “kinda comprehensible” input. Even as a highly motivated adult learner, nothing shuts me down more quickly than a constant barrage of partially understood messages. It is utterly exhausting to your brain! Kind of comprehensible input is more demotivating than understanding nothing at all because it conditions you to give up over and over and over again. “Kinda comprehensible” is exactly what is happening in classrooms around the country. In educators’ defense, I do not believe it is reasonable to suggest language learners will completely understand every portion of every lesson, but I do think it is reasonable that part of every lesson is totally comprehensible every day. Multilingual learners should leave every instructional period knowing they have engaged effectively in learning something in their new language.
Prolingual 