Teaching Mandarin Chinese in Los Angeles

Teaching Mandarin Chinese in Los Angeles

While the English language dominates the field of foreign language study for the 20th century, Mandarin Chinese is becoming a prominent language for the 21st century thanks to China's emerging force in the global economy and politics. According to American CIA's statistics on 31 December 2008, China owns the most foreign reserves and gold, 2.03 trillions US dollars (Beutner 2001).

China will be the strongest economy in the 21st century”. Jim Fisher speaks fluent Mandarin and so do his two daughters. In America “Chinese pairs are New York's latest fashion: Manhattan's elite wants to prepare its progeny for the economic world of tomorrow.” In the Los Angeles, many schools promote Mandarin teaching and learning and make it an academic subject in the official curriculum. David Graddol, a British language expert, also said in his analysis that "In the next decade the new 'must learn' language is likely to be Mandarin."

However, Jenny Clegg, in her BAC report on Chinese Studies in Los Angeles Schools, pointed out one of the major problems in Chinese teaching in America is the lack of teaching material for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (Beutner 2001). The approach for teaching Chinese in Britain still remains very much targeted for native speakers' first language acquisition and a majority of Chinese teachers haven't appreciated the methodology of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. This paper aims to give some solutions to this problem.

Zhao Yuanren, a famous Chinese linguist, regards language as “a set of habits and learning a foreign language was just like to establish a special set of habits, the acquiring of a new language consists essentially of acquiring a new set of habits, and for one who has already acquired a set of habits for his native language, it will be necessary to change many of these”. How do you set up a habit? Through repetition, by doing it over and over again, children learn to brush their teeth, tie their shoe laces and memorize the times tables. Repetition of actions has a significant effect on us—it does not only create familiarity but also leads to understanding, as it gives time for the penny to drop (Beutner 2001).

Therefore, Chinese students just follow suit and make numerous repetitions. If you apply this method to teach Chinese as second or foreign language, it will just kill the students' ...