Culture and TCFL
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 
Here’s a revealing article about how Mandarin is being taught in New Zealand. It opens with this line:
‘Confucius say getting Kiwis to learn Chinese is like banging head against brick wall.’
It continues:
‘Confucius Institute director Nora Yao says the aim to make New Zealanders China-literate sometimes seems impossible.’
One problem here lies with expectations. Too many people are drinking the ‘30 million’ kool aid. The true global demand for Mandarin is nowhere near the numbers that the Chinese government has bandied about. That myth has created some totally unrealistic expectations, like, perhaps, the one that NZ schools might suddenly, and en masse, embrace Mandarin into their core curricula in the space of a few short years (or in this case, one year).
But here’s another take on the reasons for the slow adoption from a NZ high school principal.
“We can’t find the time to fit it into our busy curriculum, and also it’s not easy finding a teacher who is proficient in teaching Mandarin”
I think the principal is closer to the mark. Miss Yao sees it as a lack of interest on the part of the Kiwis, not of anything to do with the teachers/purveyors. I somehow find that a weak argument. It may be coincidental, but in my experience, struggling teachers almost always blame the students for the problems. (I trained/observed teachers for 12 years.) Is it the congenital laziness of the New Zeland public, or is it teachers/methods that are at fault? My guess is, the latter.
Even with the best intentions, Mandarin teachers who rely on traditional methods will struggle badly in western schools. What’s worse, they oftern fail to figure out why western students are so unresponsive to their hard work. I’ve seen it happen. It is painful and unrewarding for all concerned. It can lead to the cancellation of Mandarin programs before they ever take off, because teachers think the students are lazy and students think the language is impossible. The problem will continue until there is a well defined discipline of TCFL. At the risk of sounding self-serving, they’d be better off for now using ChinesePod.
Ken Carroll