Chinese Language Arts
Different from the western alphabetic writing system, the Chinese language is non-phonetic and is character based. The fundamental element in Chinese writing is the character. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters although only 4000 are commonly used. Character recognition is regarded as one of the biggest challenges in Chinese language acquisition. It is often the case that the quantity of characters a person knows will dictate his or her ability to read and write.
Experience in teaching Chinese shows us that children quickly recognize a character as an image. Our classroom instruction is therefore tailored to match this natural way of learning. From early on, children are shown how a Chinese character is put together, its physical structure and its inherent logic. Through direct sight recognition, teachers use various ways and means to help students associate character with images and meanings. At ISTP, we teach traditional characters from nursery to 3rd grade. A traditional character has a closer resemblance to the original pictogram, and is usually loaded with greater historic information: its origin, its evolution and its logic, thus facilitating recognition and memorization.
Our approach to character writing is progressive acquisition. Students learn to write from fewer strokes to more, from simple structures to more complicated, from basic pictogram characters to ideograms. Teachers work extensively with the students to develop good Chinese learning habits, such as writing in the correct stroke order and in a balanced form.
By 3rd grade, where writing fluency becomes more demanding, simplified characters are introduced. The transition to simplified characters is completed by 5th grade. Students become proficient in reading and writing both traditional and simplified characters.
Another important learning tool available to our students is the pinyin system. As mentioned earlier, Chinese is a non-alphabet-based language; it is pictographic or idiographic. Each Chinese character has three basic elements: the sound, the shape and the meaning. When you look at a character, you may guess at the meaning by its shape (or radical), but would not be able to sound it out. Pinyin is the Romanization of a Chinese character and is employed to enable one to “pronounce” or “sound out” the characters. Beginning in first grade, students are introduced to pinyin, thus allowing them access to a greater number of characters. As students become proficient in pinyin, they grow into independent learners who can access to an increasingly larger number of traditional and simplified characters.
In elementary school, our Chinese language arts curriculum is a literature-rich program where students learn to read and write using a variety of strategies and materials, both in groups and individually. Reading for comprehension and writing for expression are the goals throughout each grade level. Students learn to ask questions, participate in discussions, and resolve problems. At the end of the second grade, students read paragraphs and stories that provide diverse information. They learn to write essays to express their feelings, needs, and opinions. Beginning in 3rd grade, students increasingly augment their skills in the three modes of communication: interpersonal, interpretive and presentational, using Chinese as a tool to learn new concepts, do research, and further access new knowledge.
Project-based learning is integrated throughout the curriculum during the elementary school years. To learn a new concept, students engage in a variety of research activities to collect more information including referencing books, magazines or newspapers, visiting Chinese websites, watching relevant educational videos in Chinese, as well as meeting with invited guest speakers. Students work mostly in small groups. At the end of each project, each student gives an oral presentation. By the end of fifth grade, the goal is for students to achieve proficiency in Chinese, that is, to be comfortable using Chinese to think, learn, and discuss.
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