A LETTER TO STUDENTS

Why do you think the immersion elementary students learn faster than junior high? Because they are young? That's one of the factors but not the major factor.

Well, have you ever watch the same movie for 100 times? You won't do it as a teen, but if you ask your parents how many times you'd watched one of your favorite TV shows when you were young, they might tell you that you watched them at least over 10 times a week. Now as a teen or an adult would you watch a movie over and over at least 10 or even 100 times in a week or in a month? Not really, right?!! Now you can see the differences.

Mmmmmm, Why do the immersion elementary students learn faster? 

The answer is simple. BECAUSE THEY DON'T MIND "MESSY" NEITHER MIND "BEYOND COMPREHENSION".  An example is, even though they don't fully understand what the teacher says in class but they 'guess' ,  'follow' , and WON'T SHUT DOWN THEIR BRAIN.

It's not because the young kids are smarter so they learn faster; actually their recognition ability is not developed as well as a teen and an adult. However, they have the strongest tools - PATIENCE AND TOLERATION. Their patience and toleration with "messy" and "beyond comprehension" allows the teachers to provide enough input and then they feel confident to produce output. 

Once again, the major and crucial factor for them to learn faster is that with their patience and toleration THEY HAVE ENOUGH INPUT FROM THEIR TEACHERS. They are patient and tolerate in doing so-called "boring" things. Don't You think so?!!

 

Now let's get back; one of my teaching philosophy is “no enough input, no good output”. A baby started to learn to speak with dadadada sound by imitating adults’ words. The baby won’t be able to speak before they have enough “input” from adults.

 

Same, if the students don’t have enough input from me for you to imitate the sound, the tone, and the phrases and sentence pattern, even though I give students time and more hands on activities, you won’t be able to produce fluent conversations in the target language.

I like using TPRStorytelling Circling questions which involve in listening, speaking, reading, writing and comprehensive input, which requires students to process their brain, to pay great attention to comprehend the content and the questions, and to speak aloud the answers.

I’ve written the words we learn in class on the posters with their English meanings on the wall and pointed at the words when I speak the story in sentences and in questions.

Students need to pay great attention to the words I say and point at and process to understand what I just say.

It takes students’ lots of efforts but once the brain processes, the words will become long-term memory.

After I make sure at least 80% students are familiar with 80% of the words, then we would do the hands-on activities to practice what is learned.

We also use reading and writing to enhance what the students are learning.

The more students pay attention, the more students can comprehend.

Same, the more students ANSWER the circling questions ALOUD, the better students are able to talk and pronounce the language.

I fully understand how difficult for students to learn Chinese characters.

I didn’t require my Level I students to recognize and write Chinese characters, not even Level 2; but on the Utah & Arizona States Curriculum maps and lots of the Chinese language proficiency tests, they all require students to be able to memorize and write more than 280 characters by Level III.

To prepare you to reach the standard/goal and for the proficiency tests I have to start to a little bit each time.

I’m not asking Level II students to recognize all the characters in the story/article we read, but some most common words that repeat more than five times in the article should be taken out the pinyin gradually in it for students to practice recognize. For example, Level II students should be able to recognize the most common Chinese characters for I, you, he and she, big, small, boy, girl, and Chinese.

I might be not able to convince you to know how fun the Chinese character forms and to learn, but it is.

Once you understand the beauty of characters, you will love it; as each character has its story.