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Senzhi -

Personally, I believe to learn Mandarin, Simplified Chinese and Hanyun Pinyin properly, you need
to have a qualifed Teacher of Chinese as a Foreign Language, native or near-native ... should not
be of such an importance.

Good luck in finding one. If you do find one in Shantou, I'll buy you dinner.

I've had native speakers, who didn't have a clue about teaching ...
I've had qualified teachers who I had to teach Pinyin ...

As an example: I'm Belgian, university graduated Adult Educator, diploma qualified in TEFL ... and
am happily teaching business English ... being Belgian (and with a vast amount of business
experience, a skill many teachers here do miss as well).

The feedback I get is that my students prefer my English towards a native speaker, simply because
I have no regional accent.
In addition, it appears indeed I can easily compete with my native counterparts with regards to
the English grammar rules.

I guess a proper qualification together with experience can beat anything.



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gato -



Quote:

I can easily compete with my native counterparts with regards to the English grammar rules.

How about Francais?










-葛亚辉- -

I think some of you just go to crappy schools....of course not all native speakers are good at
explaining things, but neither are all non-native speakers....teaching is a SKILL.

And the (native) Chinese teachers I have had have been among the finest teachers I've ever had, in
any subject.

Of course there are unskilled ones. But I think if we're trying to evaluate the value of native v.
non-native fairly, we have to assume that our hypotethical native and non-native teachers have the
same amount of teaching skill. It is, after all, something that can be learned.

Yes, non-native speakers have gone through the process of learning Chinese too, but that does not
mean they're more qualified to teach it well. For example, we all go through the process of
learning history, or math, in school, but not all of us (in fact, not many of us) could teach
those subjects well. Sharing the common expeirence of having started from ignorance does have some
value, but it does not automatically make a good teacher.

ANY teacher needs teaching skill, and I feel for those of you who have had native Chinese speakers
who lack this. But if your experience has been that natives can't teach Chinese, my experience has
been the exact opposite. Making generalizations about the inherent value of native speakers would
be rash.

As I said before, I believe they're basically equal (assuming their teaching skill is equal),
except that with native speakers you get the assurance that their pronunciation is correct and so
is their grammar. With non-native speakers, even the best of them, this isn't the case. For
example--and please don't take this personally--Senzhi's post contains a grammatical mistake.
Obviously, he or she speaks English very well, and is quite qualified to teach it--I don't mean to
suggest anything to the contrary--but his mistake is one that a native English speaker wouldn't
make.

If I've learned anything about teaching from my parents (both teachers) uncle and aunt (both
teachers) or grandparents (literally all teachers), or from my own experiences teaching, it's that
your students are always watching you. Teachers serve as models for imitation, especially in
foreign languages. If you wish to speak Chinese, presumably you hope to do it with Chinese people
sooner or later. Why, then, would anyone actively prefer a non-native speaker for their teacher if
an equally skilled native speaker was also possible?

I'll admit that in some places perhaps, skilled native teachers are unavailable but I'd advise
everyone to stay away from making generalizations about how native speakers are incapable of
teaching their own language. Being a native speaker doesn't qualify you to teach, of course, but
it doesn't disqualify you either, and anyone who believes that it does is a fool.

(And for those of you looking for places with incredible native-speaking teachers, come to Brown.
I have nothing but the highest praise for all of the Chinese-teaching staff there, they are truly
incredible.)










flameproof -



Quote:

I think some of you just go to crappy schools....

It's probably a big factor. The concept of "value for money" is not really known yet. You pay
basically for sitting the time, and you get some outdated boring learning material.

Sure, the key is not language skill, the key is TEACHING skill. But I presume that many schools do
a shortcut and think everybody that speaks the language can teach.

BTW, I am certainly not suitable as a teacher in my native language.










Jive Turkey -

I have a question for the original poster: what is a native speaker of Mandarin/Putonghua/Guoyu or
whatever you want to call it? This is an issue that is often brought up by anti-establishment
minded applied linguists in the west who question the usefulness of the label "native speaker." A
language testing guy named Alan Davies wrote a very influential book which I believe was called
"The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics." Though I don't remember him saying anything about
Chinese in it, Putonghua and whether or not there is really such a thing as a native speaker of it
is already something that a few mainland scholars have brought up.

So those of you who have already posted, I'm interested in hearing exactly what you meant when you
said you preferred or didnt prefer native Mandarin speaking teachers. What do you think native is?
A Beijinger? A northerner? An educated mainlander who speaks some variety of "Mandarin" as his
first language and has gotten a 2A or 1A/B on the PSC? A educated dialect speaker who managed to
do the same on the PSC? An educated waishengren in Taiwan? An educated Taiwanese who passed the
Guoyin test at the end of his normal university degree? There are many different shades of
"nativeness."

When I was learning in Taiwan, I seemed to prefer the waishengren teachers I had over the
non-waishengren. I don't think it had much to do with the way they spoke. I just happened to like
their personalities more than those of the locals teaching in the school where I studied. They
were a lot less provincial. Somebody in another school in Taiwan could have had the opposite
experience.

Based on the studying I've done in HK and the mainland, I'd have to say I preferred the dialect
background teachers over the northerners or Beijingers. I've been tutored by some OK northerners,
but they had a great deal of experience outside of the mainland. Most of the northerners I've had
were way too concerned about features of pronunciation or vocabulary that make little or no
difference to effective communication in pretty much all of China. I've seen northerners basically
badger out of the classroom students who wouldn't erhua words that don't rely on it to distinguish
meaning (and most don't); I've seen teachers interrupt roleplays just to correct somebody who used
whatever kind of dialect vocabulary that pretty much everybody in China would understand. I think
this kind of prescriptivism has been getting worse since the PSC was started. The test is such a
powerful influence, and in my opinion a negative influence, on how Chinese people view Putonghua
and language in general.

I've found that teachers from a dialect background or notherners who've spent time in dialect
areas and have learned dialects are more likely to cut throuth the prescriptive BS and focus more
on whether or not the learner is getting his or message across in a way that is acceptable to most
people (rather than acceptable to the the State Language Commission). If they are decently
educated, then they will still know what the prescriptive standard is and will be able to tell the
learner what that standard is if the learner wants or needs to know.

As far as comparing "native" Chinese speakers to, say, a westerner who learned Chinese as an adult
and has reached a high level of proficiency is concerned, I think the Chinese person potentially
has a very big handicap. The handicap is a result of the relative youth and limited economies of
scale of the TCSL profession. Most of the literature on second language acquisition is in English
and is about people who are learning or teaching English; the remainder of this lit is almost all
about the teaching and learning of Spanish, French, Italian or German. Very little of what's in
the A-list journals, all of which are in English, is about the teaching and learning of Chinese,
and what little there is differs markedly in research methodology and quality from the stuff
you'll find in mainland journals on TCSL. Very little of this ever even gets summarized in Chinese
publications, much less translated. Most of the concepts and theories from the A-list journals
only make it into Chinese books on TCSL in the form of very vague if not superficial descriptions.
Most CSL teachers I've known just don't have the English proficiency needed to go get a better
idea what such concepts or theories are about by reading the research articles that originally
proposed them.

In addition to lacking access to the research that good language teaching tends to be based on,
most "native" CSL teachers also don't have access to practical training programs that come
anything close to the quality of TESOL programs that are available in the west. This is mostly due
to economies of scale. Practical programs like the Cambridge CELTA and DELTA were born from
British Council and International House's need to have a sufficient supply of teachers to satisfy
massive demand for English language instruction for people who genuinely need to learn English. Do
any such programs exist for Chinese? I've not seen any, and I don't think there will be any for
quite some time. Most teacher training for CSL teachers in China is not practical at all. Most of
the teachers I've known who had MAs in TCSL said they never taught real students in any of the
teacher training programs they did and that getting experience with real teaching was seen as
something you did on your own as a part-time teacher while doing a degree in teaching.

If a beginner asked me what kinds of teachers would be best for his or her learning, I would
likely say that at the elementary or intermediate levels, a mix of native and near-native teachers
would be best. If the near-native received any reputable practical teacher training in an English
speaking country, then he's likely to be much better at planning and delivering lessons than the
native who was trained in China.










-葛亚辉- -

I have to say I'm a little skeptical of the idea that lack of access to education research means
Chinese are less likely to be good teachers. Lack of access to practical training is another
story, but in my experience, Westerners who have had a lot of training in education tend to be
terrible teachers. For instance, last summer I worked at a school with several Harvard education
grad students and grads, and they were for the most part the worst teachers there, even though
most of the rest of the faculty had basically no training or experience.

I don't know if that's the norm, but I think sometimes high-level education research gets in the
way of actual, practical teaching methods. And it's easy to forget that the specific makeup and
character of your class is a huge factor in teaching it, and that's something you can't possibly
train for or solve through edu-babble theories.

That said, hands-on experience actually teaching is obviously a big factor, and a native speaker
without that is likely to be a worse teacher than a non-native speaker who does have it.










Jive Turkey -



Quote:

I have to say I'm a little skeptical of the idea that lack of access to education research means
Chinese are less likely to be good teachers. Lack of access to practical training is another
story, but in my experience, Westerners who have had a lot of training in education tend to be
terrible teachers. For instance, last summer I worked at a school with several Harvard education
grad students and grads, and they were for the most part the worst teachers there, even though
most of the rest of the faculty had basically no training or experience.

I don't know if that's the norm, but I think sometimes high-level education research gets in the
way of actual, practical teaching methods. And it's easy to forget that the specific makeup and
character of your class is a huge factor in teaching it, and that's something you can't possibly
train for or solve through edu-babble theories.

That said, hands-on experience actually teaching is obviously a big factor, and a native speaker
without that is likely to be a worse teacher than a non-native speaker who does have it.

Well I think your scepticism of "education research" and "training in education" is healthy.
However, that't not the sort of research or training I'm talking about. IMO, most education
degrees, especially in the US, serve better as barriers to entry to the teaching market than as
good preparation for a teaching career. I wouldn't consider most Masters of Arts in Teaching in
the US to be practical training, and I don't think that making people do at least one year of
coursework before they're allowed to stand in front of real students makes good teachers.

The kind of training I'm talking about is not the sort of training that leads to a public/state
school teaching qualification, but instead qualifies somebody to teach in more market oriented
contexts like continuing education or better overseas language institutes like British Council or
International House that prepare students to study in English speaking countries. Courses that
will get you these sorts of jobs are usually shorter, more intense and more practical than what
will get you a job in public/state schools.

Language teaching research, like most academic research, certainly has its share of BS. However,
you can't really judge it as if it's part of what you call "education research." Compared to other
fields of teaching like maths or science, second language teaching is unique in that in a lot of
universities, there are two very different kinds of paths one could follow. Anybody who wants to
go into maths or science teaching would just do a standard teacher training course (i.e., a master
of arts in teaching in the US or a Cert/DipEd in other English speaking countries) in which they'd
only spend about 20% of the course learning practical or theoretical things abou teaching those
subjects. The rest is just PCmulticulturalfeministpostmoderndecontructivist fluff. You can go that
way for language teaching, too, and you pretty much have to go that way if you want to get a
license to teach in primary or secondary schools. The other way, though, and this is the way that
most people who teach in adult/continuing education, overseas universities or decent language
schools go is to first do a practical qualification like the CELTA or DELTA. If you then want to
actually get into reading research and perhaps doing a bit of your own, you can do an MA in
Applied Linguistics or TESOL that is 100% about language teaching and learning. Most of these
degrees will not lead to a primary or secondary school teaching qualification, which to me is a
good thing because it frees the program from all the influences and restrictions that come with
that. My bet is that the majority of articles that appear in the A-list journals for applied
linguistics and language teaching were written by people who took the second path. I'm not saying
that it's all good research, but it is definitely different from the "education research" that one
would read for a Master of Arts or Diploman in Education.

Putting it in a more practical way, what do you think the writers of the materials you've used to
study or the designers of the courses you've done based their decisions on? Like it or not, years
of classroom experience, whether theoretically informed or not, does not alone prepare somebody to
write good textbooks or design good courses. It takes a much broader and deeper understanding than
what one would get from classroom experience. It takes somebody who can make decisions about what
theories they will allow to inform their design of materials or courses. I'm not saying that
everybody who does an MA or PhD in Applied Linguistics can do it, but I will say that I dont' know
of any decent TESOL or TCSL textbooks that were written by somebody who lacked the theoretical
grounding that one gets from postgraduate study. Unfortunately for us CSL students, CSL teachers
who have trained in China have only gotten a superficial summary of what a postgrad student in an
English medium Applied Linguistics program would read, or I should say would have read since it
takes years for research in the A journals to trickle into Chinese books on TCSL. I'd much prefer
that my teacher, and especially the people who designed the course or materials I study to have
1.) gotten some practical classroom training before doing an MA; and 2.) read original research
themselves, analyzed it, and then decided what is BS and what might be sound rather than just read
a brief summary of what hit the A-list journals ten or fifteen years ago.










-葛亚辉- -

I agree that it takes more than just years of classroom experience to write a textbook, but I have
to disagree that you need anything more than that to design a good course. The CSL courses I've
taken have been designed by their teachers, based around a textbook, but actually, the most useful
materials I've used to this point have been those that were prepared by the teachers themselves.
(Seriously.)

Also, I would add, why are we assuming that the native-speaking chinese teacher's we're discussing
were trained in China? CSL teachers in China is one thing, but I think that native-speakers
teaching CSL in the US were generally educated, at least in part, in the West, and often speak
English well enough to have access to scholarly materials about teaching language if they want to
read them. My teachers, with one exception, have all spoken English quite well, and the one who
didn't is doing graduate work now at Seton Hall (in English) so I guess even she could have access
to these research materials you're talking about. One of them has been trained in language
teaching, in English. I agree that someone with teacher training is better than someone without,
but it seems unfair to assume that native-speakers don't have that training...(at least in the US,
I can't comment on the situation in China or Taiwan becuase I haven't studied there yet [but
soon!])

I really don't agree that you need to understand any educational theory to design a good course
anyway though. I'm sure that it helps, or can help, but it isn't a neccesary condition for a
successful class, and nor does it guarantee one. I've taken plenty of great classes taught by
people who haven't studied theory at all, and plenty of crappy ones from people who have.
Educational theory, even linguistic theory that is more scientific than other edu-theory, is only
a tool.










gato -



Quote:

I really don't agree that you need to understand any educational theory to design a good course
anyway though. I'm sure that it helps, or can help, but it isn't a neccesary condition for a
successful class, and nor does it guarantee one. I've taken plenty of great classes taught by
people who haven't studied theory at all, and plenty of crappy ones from people who have.

Knowing some language learning theory I am sure helps, but studying it full time for the one or
two years for a Master's degree I think is probably an overview. It'd be more efficient to just
read a good survey book or a series of relevant articles, and combine that with practical teaching
experience and perhaps the mock classroom teaching they do for CELTA/DELTA..

I think the important thing is that a teacher should have a thorough understanding of the subject
being taught. A math teacher should know the math that's being taught inside out; a Chinese
teacher likewise for the Chinese that's being taught. A native speaker obviously will have an
advantage in terms of pronunciation and an intuitive grasp of correct usage. Those are important
assets for a language teacher. But of course, this person should also learn enough grammar,
linguistics, language history, and so forth so that this intuitive knowledge can be more
effectively communicated to students.










flameproof -

The way out of the dilemma is, as a learner, to have some ideas about teaching and instruct your
"teacher" exactly what, and how you want to learn. You can simple not expect a teacher to find
your learning style by himself, at least not in China.












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