by Terry Waltz | May 19, 2017 | Chinese-specific, Reading, Unfounded Tripe
Recently, a teacher of an alphabetic, phonetic language who does not teach Mandarin posted online to the effect that: …heavy intellectualizing teachers are driving the Mandarin train further down into the intellectual caverns of non-productivity. This, at least,...
by Terry Waltz | May 3, 2017 | Chinese-specific
I think the issue many people are having of late about “establishing meaning” and whether it can or cannot be done via gesture comes from numbering the “steps” of TPRS. Most people aren’t actually establishing meaning solely using...
by Terry Waltz | May 2, 2017 | Chinese-specific
So you’re starting a new class using TPRS for Chinese. The first thing to figure out, in Chinese, is what language you will be using with them, followed closely by “what will they read that contains that language?” Many new TPRS teachers want to go...
by Terry Waltz | Feb 18, 2017 | Chinese-specific, Languages of Unusual Features, Methods, Reading
On a language teachers’ list, the statement was recently made by a teacher interested in the debate about naturalistic CI versus optimized CI: I have some plans to work with some Mandarin teachers to test this [naturalistic input] out. They have not been...
by Terry Waltz | Feb 17, 2017 | Chinese-specific, Reading
On a teachers’ email list, the comment was recently posted: I definitely need more than the text to understand even simple Chinese stories. Translation is ONE way of making tests more comprehensible. But I think we need to exploit other ways as well, including...
by Terry Waltz | Nov 20, 2016 | Chinese-specific, Reading
Cold Character Reading is very simple in theory: get some oral language into the students’ heads, then have them directly jump to reading that same language (but a story or text they have never seen or heard before, not something they already know the meaning...
