bob wrote

bob - I've been experimenting lately with assigning my students a chapter of "Lets Talk in English" and then in the next class asking them to translate from the Chinese back into English. You would expect this to be a reasonably easy excercise because all they have to do is read the English/Chinese versions and then listen to the English recording a bunch of times. In practice however it turns out to be considearably more difficult for two reasons: 1) They are generally too lazy to do a speck of homework. 2) The translations into Chinese are not all that accurate. This is the interesting apect of course because when we discover a mistake (or an alternative way of expressing the same idea, or something similar that might be said in a given situation...) we actually have two problems. First, how to translate the English into Chinese. Second, how to translate the Chinese into English. Translating from Chinese is much more difficult for them naturally and is the aspect of this excercise that they seem to feel is most productive. I try not to help them too much with the actual words they need, but instead give them the info they need to complete the translation for themselves. For example yesterday I had a student who constructed the following sentence from a translation "You can't keepING doing this." I responded to this by directing him to the sections in his grammar book that describe (in Chinese) the use of modals and to another page that explained the use of the present participle. It was a slow processs but he eventually discovered his own mistake, corrected it and I think learned a couple of things in the process. Anyway as often as I can I direct them to the relevant section of the grammar books we use. This helps them to undertsand "why" such and such is a mistake and why the other is correct.

After we finish translating one conversation (and discovering the inaccuracies in the book version as well as the times when two or more translations would be acceptable) we read the whole thing aloud with extremely careful focus on correct pronunciation. By the time we get to this last part they have a pretty good idea what each passage means and why the sentences are structured as they are. The careful pronunciation practice focuses attention on all those details.

Like I said before this method seems to give my students the feeling that they are learning something. Still it would be interesting to hear what the more theoretically minded of you think of this method.

Thanks.


bob - Judging from the responses so far it looks like you really set the teaching world on fire with your new technique there bob. It sounds kind of like grammar translation and audio-lingual approach rolled into one. No wonder people are so excited. Anyway bob I am curious about one thing: Given your total ignorance of the Chinese writing system how do you have any idea what the translation even says?


bob - Thanks for responding bob. Yes I know it is a little like the grammar- translation approach except opposite. Rather than asking people to translate from the target language into the native language in writing I ask them to translate from the native language into the target language orally. I guess it is something like grammar translation after all. Sort of like how black is similar to white. My method does borrow from the audio-lingual approach in recogonizing that language is essentially organized noise and the quality of the noises you produce is very much an indicator of your success in learning the language. Besides I enjoy teaching phonics. I get away without being able to read Chinese characters by having my students read the passage aloud and then writing what they say in Pinyin on the board with a word by word translation into English under that. It is an interesting way to highlight the grammatical differences between the languages. Any more questions?

bob wrote: Any more questions?

bob - Just a couple. You say that you reference your students to the section of the grammar text that will help them complete a translation. Isn't that rather difficult to do? I mean do you know the text that well or are you able to anticipate before hand the problems they will have, which of course would give you an opportunity to look up the answers before the class?

bob - do you know the text that well or are you able to anticipate before hand the problems they will have, which of course would give you an opportunity to look up the answers before the class?

bob - That's the tough part definitely as I certainly don't know the texts that well. I use the Betty Schrampfer series and as you might already know they contain a lot of material. After the first run through with one student though it gets a lot easier as they frequently make the same mistakes. Anyway one of the first sentences I teach my students is "Nobody knows everything and everybody makes mistakes." Watching me try to juggle this method certainly provides them with plenty of evidence in support of that statement.