I was observing CHS 201 for the whole semester last year. Since I am a native speaker of Chinese, I was more like a helper in the classroom. So, I guess that can be count as the experience of tutoring as well. The teacher is not using a quite advanced way to teach Chinese. She was only using the “Audio-lingual method” to teach. I was “act” like the voice tape. She brought a PPT, and almost every slide I read out loud and repeat 2 times. Well, I am not saying this teacher is bad, but her teaching method is truly old-fashioned. Chinese teachers always used this method to teach literature in the ancient time, for example, Confucius did this too. And ancient teachers believe that “repetition” makes perfect. If you repeat more than one thousand time, then you know the true essence of it.
As we learnt in our classroom, the audio-lingual method is more like a habit formation, and less emphasis on meanings. Also, the learner errors are really bad. I think teacher who use this method need less time to prepare for the class.
For the whole semester acting as “voice tape”, I found that students who are not pay attention to memorize, fall behind easily. Let’s say student A did not go to class on Monday, then it is really difficult for A to catch up, since he did not even know how to pronounce every character properly. So I feel this is one of the drawbacks of this method.
I am planning to teach Chinese in the future. Chinese should be the second or third language to students in my classroom. I was trying to know the common mistakes that L2 student would make. And I would like to use a more advanced way, for example, communicative approach to teach Chinese. In this way, my students will acquire more skills on how to use Chinese to communicate, but not just memorize the words.
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