Both ChinesePod and SpanishPod come under the banner of Praxis Language. The Praxis vision is pretty radical: re-formulating how online language learning is done. (We, er, don’t lack ambition.)
Recently, Praxis were asked by National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOCFL) to develop a web strategy for their Confucius Institutes. (NOCFL are also known as han ban.) We have accepted. In a couple of months we will launch the Online Confucius Institute (OCI) - more details here and here.
This is a prestigious commission. The CI’s are the equivalent of the British Council, the Goethe Institut, or Alliance Francaise. Thus far the various Confucius Institutes around the world have developed their own websites, but independently and without any consistent brand, design, or theme. The new OCI will provide a center of gravity that will hopefully support the efforts of the various Institutes and bring the world-wide community of teachers and learners of Chinese a little bit closer together.
I think there may be some other interesting angles to the story.
The Chinese government gets web 2.0?
First of all, han ban is a government entity, appointed by the State Council. By commissioning us to design/develop/build the OCI, they have shown a remarkably progressive outlook. We pretty much have a free hand to develop it as we please and that includes maximizing the web 2.0 features, social networking, and and other participatory elements.
I believe the OCI design will allow it to leapfrog the standard, web 1.0 fare of the British Council and others. This will put he CIs way ahead. (Who says the Chinese government doesn’t get the web?)
The political thing
People are already asking if the political motivation behind the CIs is to infiltrate western universites with Chinese propaganda. In almost every article you read about the CIs, you get the ‘concerned’ people, so let me share a secret with you: no-one from the han ban has ever asked us to spy for them! Nor have they talked about propaganda, soft power, hard power, electric power, or anything else that might be construed as a political motivation. No hint of ploitics ever came up in any conversation we have had with them. In fact, they more or less handed the entire project to us because they didn’t have the capability internally. (I’m not sure how they’re supposed to infiltrate the free world if they cannot do their own web strategy.) I’m kind of small government guy by persuasion because I believe all goverments are obtuse. From what I’ve seen of han ban it will be a long time before they develop the capability that these chaps (another obtuse government entity) seem to fear in them.
TCFL
The discipline of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, TCFL, is not yet well developed. It is, however, the single biggest obstacle to the spread of Mandarin. There simply aren’t enough teachers out there who could teach Mandarin in a way that works for other cultures. My hope is to use not just the latest technologies but to try to encourage more progressive thinking in how the discipline might develop. I’m hoping to adopt pedagogical approach that embraces connectivism and other disciplines.
I’ll let you know more details as things develop. In the meatnime, feel free to suggest, criticize, or chastise.
Ken Carroll
Congratulations. You folks definitely have your work cut out for you. I think the biggest issue with Chinese is the writing system. I’ve been studying Mandarin for a few months now and I think the Pinyin isn’t that hard to get. The tones and the “c” and “z” sounds still give me trouble but I feel confident that I can eventually master them. The characters are what I find to be most challenging. Nothing new there really.
What’s wrong with China doing PR and promoting its language? China has its problems, to be sure, but so does every other country. It’s a country that was carved up for years by foreign powers and it wants to solidify itself before opening up to the world completely. If further understanding from the West gets China to open up even more then I think it’s a positive thing, both for China and the West.
Interesting link to connectivism, I hadn’t heard of this theory before. The writer of that article doesn’t understand constructivism as he thinks that it doesn’t (cannot?) address issues of organisational learning. He also thinks that learning can exist in such things as databases, but then says that people are needed to be connected to databases in order for that to be classified as learning. Learning is ‘actionable knowledge’ to him. So he’s confused. Are you too, or do you really *get* what he’s saying? I’m a constructivist and just see vague handwaving, misunderstandings and apparent contradictions in his writing. That just means I can’t make sense of it!
I agree with Ryan. Of course the Confucius Institutes are part of a soft power campaign, just like (as you mention) the British Councils, etc. Nobody has a problem with those (well, except the Russians).
If the Hanban is the pointy tip of the Chinese strategy to conquer the world, we can all sleep soundly tonight
I’m looking forward to this site. Linease, the previous incarnation, had some decent, professionally produced content, but the delivery was atrocious. I know we can do better.
Congratulations. I agree with both John and Ryan. Keep up the good work. I am very impressed with ChinesePod, and confident that you will take this work in a good direction. I am noticing that there are possibilities of ChinesePod expanding into other languages beyond Spanish too, just don’t get too overextended.
Our time knows about the huge hidden costs of a lack of understanding between nations. From that lofty viewpoint, I am very enthusiastic about large scale teaching of the Chinese language. I also have no worries that the soft power of the CI will take over the world anytime soon.
On a smaller scale, I can see possible problems for Chinese Pod. It seems to me that the Chinese government does have a clear net strategy, and that this strategy is not always conductive to increased mutual international understanding. If you work very closely with government agencies, you will become a small part of the government’s bigger net policy. I can imagine scenarios in the future where such an association might not benefit Chinese Pod.
I can’t help commenting on the link to connectivism too. This paper is full of buzzwords. I do understand some of them.
From my work, I happen to have a very precise understanding of the concept of chaos. So I do know that it is NOT about “everything being interconnected”. This is a misinterpretation of the butterfly analogy. Chaos has to do with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, but not to
“changing your decision when the initial conditions change”.
Some of the other buzzwords from the article I do not understand, but I gather from a precious post, that the author of the article has as little true understanding of some of them as he has of “chaos theory”.
I assume that the author might say “The pipe is important, not the content. The main thing is that I connect ideas, if I I understand those ideas or not is unimportant”.
I would not agree with this.
Just to avoid any mistakes, I should add that I am a great fan of the work at Chinese Pod. I think that it constitutes a real breakthrough in language learning.
Pingback: Danwei : Praxis gets Internet contract for Confucius Institutes
” The discipline of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, TCFL, is not yet well developed. It is, however, the single biggest obstacle to the spread of Mandarin. There simply aren’t enough teachers out there who could teach Mandarin in a way that works for other cultures.” (Ken Carroll, above)
Good point!
A native speaker of English who studied Mandarin at a university outside China, I speak, read and write Chinese very fluently, and do management training in Chinese for a living. But I’ve been appalled at what passes for “teaching Chinese” here in the PRC.
I don’t think most teachers have a clue as to how a non-native actually “learns” Chinese. For starters, a totally different approach needs to be taken to teaching a student OUTSIDE of China vs. one ALREADY LIVING in China. Those who have just arrived in China, for instance, need “survival Chinese. Now!
And so forth.
I would submit that you may need to clarify just WHO your target audience is, because I can imagine you will have at least 3 distinct groups (I assume all are outside China when using the URL you will create):
Group 1
— New students at a CI
Group 2
— Long-term students at a CI
Group 3
— Long-term “distance only” learners
These groups have rather different needs. My suggestions:
Group 1: New students
— Chinese tend to teach Chinese as they learn English in China, that is, teaching how to read and write more or less simultaneously with teaching how to speak. If this involves learning how to write Chinese characters, many students will drop out or at least become less confident about their ability to eventually master the language. The key is to use romanization (hanyu pinyin) for the first 3-6 months, and ensure the student can read and write comfortably in pinyin BEFORE introducing Chinese characters. The ability to accurately capture in Latin letters the sound and tone of a given Chinese word will inevitably give the learner a very solid basis from which to move forward with conversational Chinese.
Group 2: Long-term CI attendees
— Two points here.
— Point one: Chinese teachers tend to teach Chinese as an exercise in rote memorization, i.e., copy the character 50 times using a pen, and you will surely learn it. The web site should make the most of different approaches, such as teaching the learner how to “deconstruct” a Chinese character into elements such as a classifier (radical) and a phonetic element. It’s fun, less of a burden on the poor Westerner’s brain, and can actually make a given character more “memorable.”
— Point two: Chinese teachers tend to share the belief that “recognizing” a character is inferior to being able to “write” it on command. Therefore they place great emphasis on teaching how to write and memorize the characters.
However, it is eminently possible to be able to read widely in Chinese, and communicate in characters, WITHOUT being able to write more than 1,000-2,000 characters.
I am a living example: I can read/write on topics such as the IT industry, linguistics, translation theory. Yet I can only write, say, 1500 Chinese characters flawlessly…if you insist I do so with a PEN.
How? Simply by using a keyboard on a computer or a phone. Input the pinyin sound, and choose the desired character from among 10-30 alternatives. This requires the ability to 1) Input the correct sound in latin letters, and 2) Recognize which of the homophones is the character you actually want.
Therefore, for mid-level students you may want to design software/content which actively teaches “writing” (what is often called “generating”) Chinese via a keyboard. This could be VERY useful to a student who wants to chat in basic Chinese, or when s/he actually comes to China.
My final suggestion would be to AVOID trying to serve all three of these groups straight off on one web site. Your client may want you to do so, but Group 3 (distance learners) may need to wait until you have learned how to best service Groups 1 and 2. Long distance learners of anything can easily find themselves dissatisfied, and trying to learn a tonal language off the web will require a positively brilliant solution!
Bruce Humes
xumushi@yahoo.com
Pingback: Shanghai Eye » Blog Archive » Confucius say: learn Chinese by web 2.0
Hi Ken – first, as others have noted, congratulations! Sounds like an exciting project.
A quick response to Richard and marcelbdt:
By way of a bit of history – the original article on connectivism was self-published based largely on my experiences with learning online. The article – which was not initially intended for peer review in the traditional academic sense, was picked up by ITDL (a peer review journal). My initial intent was an article for discussion, trying to give name/face/characteristics to what I was experiencing as I was learning through a network of personal connections enabled by technology (these technologies eventually acquired the umbrella term “web 2.0″). As such, if you would like to critique connectivism, I would encourage you to review subsequent work that addresses many of the concerns you’ve both expressed in your comments. Many have contributed to the development of connectivism as a concept and a theory. Here are a few resources you may want to explore:
First: a critique: http://elearning.surf.nl/e-learning/english/3793
My reaction to the critique: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/Connectivism_response.doc
Learning networks and connective knowledge (Stephen Downes): http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html
Teaching and Learning in Knowledge Networks: http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf
Online Connectivism Conferece proceedings: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=9 (you’ll find speaker presentations, podcasts on the right-hand side). The discussion forum has extensive debate on suitability of connectivism as a theory, impact, practical application, etc.
I believe your concerns about “buzzwords” or “vague hand waving, misunderstandings, and apparent contradictions” are addressed in the many of the above writings. The initial paper on connectivism has value, I believe, in presenting a view that knowledge exists in a network of connections…and that learning is the act of creating/building/growing that network. The fact that we are having this discussion is an indication of the affordances of technology. A view of learning is required that acknowledges the primacy of the connection and the new opportunities created by globally distributed conversations (often mediated by technology). Consider, for example, the complex task of addressing the SARS incident in 2003. The challenge of identifying the virus was too complex to be handled via traditional means. WHO set up a research network of 11 research labs in 9 countries…which resulted in an identification of the virus at a far more rapid timeline than would generally occur. Opening our expertise to, and solving our problems with, networks reflects what I (and many others – notably Stephen Downes) have been saying about connectivism. Knowledge is distributed within networks (more specifically connections) and learning is the act of navigation that network.
Take care,
George
After looking at their current site, and the lesson sites they link to, and many other Chinese based learning sites, it wouldn’t be hard to conclude that Chinese teachers, the best of them, are uneducated cretins. No, I’m not being mean, I’m being precise, in the hope that it can be fixed. If nobody else is going to be rude enough to say the bleeding obvious, it will all continue and Chinese education will become an object of ridicule as it grows. Let me explain.
For every Chinese staffed learning related site for Westerners that I can think of, the language of their formally published web communications, and of the lessons, is English. Not only do they do a consistently lousy job of the English, but worse, they seem both oblivious to their errors and too audacious to permit some rudimentary proof reading to be done before worldwide publication. With the number and type of errors, it reads like it has been written by an uneducated person whose brain has some strange quirks that make it spit out bizarre words. Without the auditory input of a Chinese accent, it can read like the language of an imbecile.
Sure, English is a really hard language to get perfect, and we don’t expect perfection all the time, but what’s important is to realise that even if you are a Chinese person with fluent English and a PhD in Shakespeare, your written english is still going to be crap and you must be humble enough to have it checked and fixed by someone whose English is perfect, every time, before you let others see it. Even more so when you are trying to present yourself as an educated person, one who can use English, a professional in the language business. And much much more so when you propose to use the English language to instruct others.
You’ll always get polite flattery, no matter how many errors, but don’t believe it, because those people will be laughing behind your back instead of trying to help.
It is difficult to find a single web page on these sites that contains no obvious English errors. Go into the more educational matter, and the situation becomes alarming. Chinese words and phrases to be taught are often translated into English words which we have not been used for 200 years, or which don’t collocate, or which have never existed, or which simply make no sense at all. The chosen English word might be satisfactory, but when put into the example sentence, the grammar is so wrong that it takes longer to work out the meaning of the English sentence than it does to read the Chinese sentence. And far too often, instead of choosing an equivalent English word, a new word is invented out of thin air!
Not only does it put a thick layer annoyance insult and distraction over attempts to study, it also leaves students with zero confidence in the teacher’s ability to explain, in English, what a Chinese word or phrase means. And isn’t that what I’m paying for, huh? When we get to more subtle shades of meaning and usage, the teacher’s feeble attempts to communicate this matter in English will be far worse than useless.
You don’t need impeccable English in order to use English to teach Chinese. A teacher’s English can be poor, so long as they teach well, accept correction happily, and provide plenty of very reliable resources. For example, in a classroom, the teacher’s language can lapse frequently, and that’s no problem at all, so long as perfection is maintained in the textbook that the class is based on. The teacher must also be willing to accept questions and corrections from the students trying to obtain clear information. But most teaching sites and even some textbooks are coming out of China written in Chinglish or unhelpfully obtuse English, as if the object is to get anything written down quickly and throw it at the grateful pigs. When you prepare a learning web site, you’re actually writing a textbook, and it has to be right, all the time. Who wants to learn something that’s wrong and then try to unlearn it later? When you are promoting yourself as a language expert who students can trust, your promotional material must demonstrate that in every way at all times. A language blemish will sour the first impression, and a blemish of attitude is unrecoverable.
I wonder, what kind of education system allows millions to study English for over a decade without learning that a comma must always be followed by a space? Surely that’s not hard. What kind of education system acknowledges that it is difficult to decide whether an English word should be singular or plural, but lets people earn higher degrees without ever getting the hang of it, and then encourages them to believe with great conviction that their English is always beyond correction because of their awarded status? What kind of teacher training allows writers of instructional material to “take a stab at” the way to explain in English, disregarding whether it has meaning for the English speaking learners or not, and then formally publish this material worldwide without allowing correction first? In that light you have to wonder, is this the kind of approach to education that they will use to teach us? So can we really rely on anything they tell us, either about the language or how to learn it? Do they care? If I study hard for 20 years like the Professor has done, will my Chinese still sound as bad as her English?
The solution is so very simple it makes me want to cry. All that is required is to have a well educated native English speaker on staff who checks everything thoroughly and makes corrections before publication. Everything, every time, no exceptions. After all, it is an English language publication. For bonus points, how about trying out your lesson material on real learners who are prepared to offer helpful criticism of how well the English communicates to them?
The places where this essential step is taken (e.g. ChinesePod) are so many worlds apart from the apparently pompous and insular Chinese-staffed organisations, that Westerners are bound to gravitate to places where they are understood and communicated with respectfully in their own language, and leave thousands of well funded organisations and trained up Chinese teachers feebly waving their little red flags on the sidelines. What a waste!
Using English to teach Chinese properly requires very high level English skills, way beyond the level that is revered in China. Just because your English is better than any other Chinese person you know, doesn’t mean it is good enough. If you haven’t got those skills, at least within your impeccable teaching resources, don’t even try teaching in English unless you can team up with a real English expert and readily accept their correction before reaching out to students in their own language. And never, never publish your errors.
George,
Thanks for the response to my comments. I’ve had a quick scan through the critique you cite and looked at your response to it. I didn’t find in your response that you’ve responded to the critique’s questioning of your claim that learning can exist in non-human appliances. Did I miss it? I also question this claim – to me its nonsense because, as a constructivist, I recognise that non-human appliances don’t work with meaning as humans do, they merely are containers for syntax. So for your claim to hold up, a non-human appliance would need to create meaning. From within your framework, how do you propose that this creation of meaning would take place ?
Auntie Sue,
I’d just say let the market work out whether these are mere blemishes or true obstacles to success. IMHO perfect English is neither sufficient nor necessary for success at teaching Chinese. To set such a bar for a small, growing concern would be a mistake.
Ken,
My feeling is that Connectivism is a convenient bridge getting us from where we are today to a world where expert knowledge will be more readily available than ever before.
But at its roots I see it as a theory that simply states “the bigger the library and the faster we can get at the knowledge and have conversations about the knowledge the better for the individual and society as a whole”.
Who can argue with that? And who can argue that having more expert knowledge at your beck and call is not good?
My feeling however is that this thinking should never insulate any single EXPERT from a most reasonable question: Is there a better way for me to learn what you are teaching than what you are currently offering? And if you can increase this speed, what means will you be using? Can you tell me?
In my opinion Connectivism helps me see education as more democratic (excellent), more closely tied to socially constructed knowledge (great), and more as a conversation between experts (makes sense). What it doesn’t tell me is how to increase the speed at which a learner learns a given learning object “X, Y, or Z”.
Pingback: Getting Into China for Foreign Tech, Biz Pros | The China Vortex
Pingback: CER links: China media semantics, Jim Rogers gets a bad review - China Economic Review