22. Mai 2022 um 08:12 : Kreativität im Unterricht
Intro: Teste dich selbst. Wie viele Verwendungsweisen für eine Gabel findest du?
1. a. Wann hattest du zuletzt folgendes Erlebnis? Einen Moment der Inspiration. Eine unerwartete Idee. Eine (leise) Ahnung, die zu einer wichtigen Entdeckung führte.
b. Wann ist die kreativste Zeit des Tages für dich?
c. Nenne einen Ort, der für dich Quelle der Inspiration war/ ist.
d. Welche Person hat dich inspiriert/ inspiriert dich und warum?
e. Wie reagierst du, wenn du diesen plötzlichen Moment der Kreativität oder Inspiration hast?
2. Zur Definition von Kreativität.
Guilford nennt drei Kriterien für kreatives Denken. Versuche Beispiele für jedes aus deiner eigenen Erfahrung zu finden:
a. Geschwindigkeit (Schnelligkeit der Ideengenerierung)
b. Flexibilität (die Fähigkeit, sich durch einen Wechsel der Herangehensweise aus der Routine zu befreien)
c. Originalität (das Streben nach ungewöhnlichen Denkansätzen bei Problemen, für die es keine richtige Antwort gibt)
3. Allgemeine Strategien für mehr Kreativität nach Torrance (Auswahl):
a. Die Fähigkeit, Probleme zu finden
b. Die Fähigkeit, möglichst viele alternative Lösungsansätze zu finden
c. Kombinieren und neu zusammensetzen
d. Flexibel und offen sein (auch: Ambiguitätstoleranz)
e. Die Umgebung wahrnehmen (z.B. Emotionen) und sie aufnehmen (nutzen)
f. Bewegung, Klang und Visualisierungen nutzen
g. Konzentriert, engagiert und motiviert sein
h. (Voraussetzung): Spezifisches Wissen und bereichsspezifische Fähigkeiten
Denke daran: Kreative Menschen brauchen auch Selbstvertrauen und Risikobereitschaft. Nur mit viel Mut kannst du dein volles Potenzial ausschöpfen.
4. a. Was bedeutet für dich, ein „kreativer Lehrer/ kreative Lehrerin“ zu sein? Wie wichtig ist es für dich, im Unterricht kreative Ansätze einzusetzen? Versuche, 3 – 5 Ideen zu finden.
[Lösungsbeispiele:
i. Ich mag es nicht, im Unterricht nur nach dem Lehrbuch zu Unterrichten. Für mich gehört zur Kreativität auch, alte Regeln zu hinterfragen und sie unter Umständen zu brechen, oder anders gesagt, signifikante Änderungen daran vorzunehmen, eben experimentieren.
ii. Ich möchte die Lernenden mit originellen Aufwärmübungen überraschen, oder versuche Wege zu finden, die Grammatik anders, zum Beispiel anschaulich und unterhaltsam, zu präsentieren, damit auch Sprachungeübte Zugang finden.
iii. Für mich ist das Wichtigste im Unterricht Spaß, und ich nutze fantasievolle Abwandlungen der Aufgaben, damit die Lernenden sich freuen und stärker motiviert sind.]
b. Denke an einen kreativen Lehrer/ eine kreative Lehrerin, den/ die du in der Vergangenheit hattest. Versuche, dich möglichst lebhaft an die Details zu erinnern. Wie hast du dich dabei gefühlt?
c. Ändere die Perspektive: Du bist jetzt der/die Lernende. Was bedeutet es für dich, einen kreativen Lehrer/ kreative Lehrerin zu haben?
5. Warum Kreativität im Unterricht? Drei Ideen aus Chaz Pugliese: “Being creative – The challenge of change in the classroom”.
a. Wenn die Lerninhalte überraschend sind, trägt das dazu bei, dass die Lernenden sie sich leichter merken können.
b. Originelle Aufgaben motivieren, Lernende und Lehrende. Es ist die beste Methode, um Routine zu vermeiden.
c. Inhalte lassen sich leichter personalisieren.
6. Beispiele für kreative Umsetzungen im Unterricht (Ideen aus Chaz Pugliese: “Being creative – The challenge of change in the classroom”):
a. Stell dir vor, es geht gerade um “Grimms Märchen” und der Lernende soll sich eines aussuchen und den Inhalt wiedergeben. Sei kreativ! Lass sie zum Beispiel die Geschichte rückwärts erzählen.
b. Oder du als Lehrkraft erzählst das Märchen, aber nimmst komische Änderungen vor, die der/die Lernende korrigieren muss (flipped classroom). Dann frage den/die Lernende/n, welche der von dir als Lehrende gemachten Änderungen er/sie gerne behalten würde.
c. Du erzählst von deinem letzten Urlaub, letztem Wochenende oder einem anderen erlebnisreichen Tag, aber du als Lehrkraft sprichst die Sätze nicht zu Ende. Stattdessen stoppst du an einer geeigneten Stelle und lässt die Lernenden die Sätze beenden und damit erzählen, was dir passiert ist.
d. Finde im Internet witzige und/ oder komische Buch- und Filmtitel. Lies sie vor und lass dann die Lernenden erzählen, worum es in dem Buch oder Film geht.
e. Frage die Lernenden, welche bekannte/ berühmte Person sie gut finden. Erzähle dann, dass sie jetzt die Möglichkeit hätten, diese Person zu treffen. Welche Fragen würden sie dieser Person stellen wollen?
7. Improvisierst du manchmal, also reagierst du spontan auf das, was gerade in der Luft liegt?
Es wird gesagt, man braucht mindestens 10 Jahre Unterrichtserfahrung, bis man so viel spezifisches Wissen und bereichsspezifische Fähigkeiten entwickelt hat, dass man spontan nach Situation entscheiden kann, welche Ideen am besten anzuwenden sind, bzw. wie man sie in dieser Situation am besten abwandeln kann.
Brain-Friendly Teaching: Repetition
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So, we already know that after the information has passed the Limbic system, in order to let it progress to the subcortex and then the cortex (which is the long-term memory) it is a. important that the stimulus docks at a previously known structure and b. repetition is key to strengthening the neuronal connections and making the information accessible.
We could kill two birds with one stone, and start the session with a review of what was examined the previous sessions, so we connect it to something that was learned and also repeat it. What other methods can we find to link new information to old information?
1. Structure the content and link new information to already known information
a. Associating words and structures with the native equivalent. An idea would be to present a word that is similar in meaning and in sound both in the learners’ language and in the target language or provide a translation into the learner’s native language. It is proven that up to level B1, the mother tongue or other already firmly anchored languages are usually triggered while learning the new language. Approaches to multilingual didactics are beneficial for teaching vocabulary, as well as contrast and comparison in language structure.
An example of a similarity or equivalent in the grammatical structure (not in meaning), is the following: I found a similar structure in Chinese for the German separable verbs. By highlighting this, the Chinese student had an easier understanding of this grammatically complex structure.
Still, a monolingual approach is preferred. However, the comparisons made with the mother tongue enhances not only information storage, but also motivates the learners to bring their cultural perspective to the table and feel valued.
b. Mind maps. We know already that embedded learning is more efficient than isolated learning. For example, we can present mind maps, which we also call “Word-Hedgehogs” in German, or a structure in which objects are classified according to certain criteria.
It is also important not only to sort the new (and old) information by semantic criteria, but also create mind maps that sort the words by criteria like sound (phonology) or word structure (morphology). All these aspects will be referred to in the mental lexicon. This method is much more brain-friendly and can ease confusion when presenting words that do not belong to the same structures.
In this mind map, we see the letter combination “ch” which can be pronounced differently depending on the vowel that proceeds.
c. Taxonomy. We can also sort words using other criteria, and add new words into existing structures. The techniques we can use are, for example:
- Learn the word with synonyms/ antonyms;
- Learn the collocations;
- Express the general concept or idea: summarize of the ideas under one concept;
- Give examples to elaborate;
- When you have gradable adjectives, you can build scales;
and so on.
2. Repetition through cyclically recurring content
For repetition, it is crucial that the content is not presented identically, but in various forms later on. For example, we can change the input channel, like presenting an audio or a text. Or we can use a different text format, like a dialogue, a written story or an advertising pitch using the same topic and vocabulary. Cyclical learning with increasing levels of difficulty or new aspects creates a varied repetition effect much more engaging than mechanical repetition.
Brain-Friendly Teaching: Relevance
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So as we know from the previous posting (Brain-Friendly Teaching: Basics), the first stage in which the information goes through is the Limbic system, laying emphasis on the relevance and also the emotions, which should be relaxed, yet not boring, and challenging, yet not stressful.
How can we present lesson content that is relevant for the student?
The first thing that comes to mind is to explicitly point out what is important for the students and why. For example, if a student asks why they have to learn the “Konjunktiv II”, as a teacher, you could highlight that it would make the learners’ speech much more polite in specific situations.
So, if you feel as though you haven’t convinced them and it still hasn´t resonated with the student, the next step is to build bridges. Here are three recommendations:
a. Storytelling. What is storytelling? For example, to convince the Chinese learners about the importance of saying “How are you?” and “Thank you I am fine and you?” (a concept which is not common in China in that way). I started telling them a story about my own language learning experience, where I had to learn a similar notion, but in the Arabic language, and could not understand the relevance of that in the beginning. However, I suddenly understood that it is a form of politely greeting someone when you meet them. I started applying it and my Arabic teacher was very pleased with me. I could hear the Chinese giggling a bit when I told them the story, and in the following sessions, I could hear the “initial greeting phrases” much more frequent than before.
Generally speaking, from a neurochemical point of view, the connection between emotion and the willingness to act is scientifically approved. This all comes down to the releasing of neurotransmitters in the listeners’ brain.
b. Pictures in general. You can present the learners with a topic, such as: “Talk about the natural environment and the impact that humans have on it”. As you can see, this idea is very abstract, which can inhibit learners from feeling engaged. How about presenting this picture of a coral reef with fishes, which seems so pristine, but then surprisingly, you recognize the plastic bag intertwined. What emotions might this cause you? It is proven that the more intense the emotions are in a situation like this, the more likely it’ll be that listeners or learners remember the things presented. A scientific experiment showed that there is a correlation between the level of emotion generated and the students’ ability to remember the information they were told.
Instead of using photos and pictures you could also use metaphoric or picturesque language to describe linguistic phenomena. Examples for that is the “verb-kicker” to describe a conjunction of a subclause which “kicks” the verb out of its normal position to the end of the sentence. Then, you can also explain the sense of the “modal particles” as the spices added to the “language soup”, because they are not containing real information (“nutrition”) itself, but they enrich the speech and make it more pleasant (“delicious”) to hear. I just remembered another picture I use to demonstrate the difference between “als” and “wie” for comparison in German, which is a simple scale that is balanced (equal) for “wie” and unbalanced when you want to use the word “als” to compare two things.
c. Change the words of an idea. Here, I follow the rhetoric trainer Mr René Borbonus, who is famous in Germany: Instead of saying “circle training” which everybody hated at school, call it “Crossfit” and everybody will storm into the gym with enthusiasm. Instead of “please eat slowly” what your parents might have told you when you were a child, call it “Slow Food”, a movement first became popular in Italy which emphasizes the pleasure of eating good food slowly. Have you ever thought about participating in a marathon and then never did it because it sounded unrewarded and exhausting? What if I told you that it’s actually is a “Color Run” with a “finish festival” at the finish line? Doesn’t that sound more appealing? So, what has changed? It is possible to reframe an activity in a person’s mind by only changing the words.
Clearly, these are ways you can build bridges to reach your learners.
We should keep in mind that it has to be fun to learn languages. The emotional content is even more important overall than the presentation of the didactic content. The teacher is characterized not so much by their didactic as by their motivating and empathetic skills.
Brain-Friendly Teaching: Basics
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I. Limbic system
I would like to start with the Limbic system because it is the first stage of the brain for incoming information to pass through. The Limbic system considers two basic aspects before incoming information gets permission to pass through to the next stage:
A. The relevance check and the connection to previous knowledge. As for the relevance, you could explain in advance why you are doing something or why it is important. And remember, an AHA effect never comes isolated. It comes when something new connects with something you already know.
B. Information will only be taken in when the emotions are supporting it. In short: the Limbic system wants to pique its interest in a relaxing atmosphere. You have to find the balance between relaxing, yet not boring, and challenging, yet not stressful.
!! Remember: Information that is not relevant and not emotionally connected will not resonate!!
Over to you:
a. The content: How do you make a lesson relevant?
b. The emotions: How do you create a relaxed yet challenging atmosphere?
!! Remember, the greatest stressors in class are time pressure, sensory overload and anxiety to perform. In the worst case, the learner could blackout and no information would be taken in !!
II. The Attention Span
!! Normally, the first attention span lasts – even if the topic is interesting – for about 10 minutes, and after 20 minutes, the brain mostly turns off for a moment !!
So these are the times you should pay the most attention to.
Here you could give them what is called an ECS emotionally competent stimulus. You can imagine the function of the ECS like resetting the students’ attentional clocks.
Examples for an ECS are:
- Telling them about a fact that makes them wonder. Surprise is a powerful emotion. When a story is unexpected, then we are also more likely to remember it.
- Tell them something that makes them laugh, like a joke. When you hear the class laughing you know their attention is back on track.
- Or maybe you have an inspiring story, that makes them internalize the topic at hand.
To enhance the attention, you could also change the resource or the social form.
You only have to be careful that you don’t change the resource (slides in the presentation) too quickly because that inhibits concentration.
Another hint: Take advantage of the power of your voice, modulate it It is helpful to gain attention.
Over to you:
How do you catch the students’ attention? How to you avoid attention loss?
III. From Subcortex to Cortex
What do we have to consider when we want to make the information progress further than the Limbic system? To enter the subcortex and then proceed to the cortex (which is the long-term-memory), there are two aspects:
A. Within the subcortex, the stimulus or the information is searching for somewhere to dock. The stimulus can be processed more efficiently when it encounters a similar structure (which is called pattern matching).
B. In this stage repetition is key. Learning is achievable when the neurons build firm connections through the synapses, and this network will be created only through repetition of the stimulus.
Through frequent repetition, the knowledge will be saved in the cortex (long-term-memory) as a neuronal network (our aim!).
!! A new word has to be repeated by the learner approximately 80 times to penetrate the long term memory, which is the cortex. They should learn 8-12 new words per day, depending on the learner !!
!! If you do not continue learning and repeating after that, the neuronal connections get lost again !!
You could start the class with a repetition of the words from the previous session, and then again after 3-4 weeks and then again after 3 months.
Over to you:
A: What can you do as a teacher to link new information to old information?
B: How and how often do you repeat the vocabulary with the students?
IV. Short fact summary:
Breaks or an ECS are important after 10-20 minutes to reset the learners’ attentive clock.
You need about 80 repetitions until the word is firmly anchored in the mental lexicon.
After that, keep repeating the words in longer intervals (3 – 4 days/ months/ years)
V. Positive Feedback
Why positive feedback is important: During a process which is called operant conditioning, a certain behaviour is reinforced (positive or negative). After a positive reinforcement, the behaviour should occur more often, after a negative reinforcement, the learner may feel discouraged and may not carry it out again.
So, if you praise a learner, they’ll want to be praised again and do their homework with enthusiasm. (Praise= positive reinforcement= Dopamine release). If you criticize the student, he will most likely not continue doing homework.
How to adjust the training better to the learner
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When you start working as an online tutor, you don’t need to pay too much attention to course planning, because you might often be booked once by the student. The student just has a grammar question he wants solving or might book you for a conversation in the foreign language to apply what they have just learned.
However, there might be students with long term motivation and specific goals. This is where a trainer should not rely on the given textbooks but should conduct a ‘needs analysis’ to keep the course personalized and individual and work towards the student’s goal.
Here are some thoughts about needs analysis and situation analysis.
The definition for a “need” varies from expectations and wishes to gaps and constraints. The learner might be in a new environment at work, where they have to perform different transactions using a specific foreign language. The hotel receptionist, for example, has to greet the hotel guests, handle check-in procedures and inform them in various languages of accommodation available in the hotel. The teaching starts at the discrepancy between what the learner can already do in the foreign language and what they should be able to do.
In my opinion, the language trainer can never fully rely on given textbooks or curricula. To find out the student’s particular needs, they should examine the tasks usually performed in a specific occupation and keep the course content as personalized and individual as possible. You can also provide the learner with a questionnaire, but you should be aware of the potential pitfalls of using this method. Self-rating is subjective and the learner might choose a specific answer in order to be seen in a better light. Therefore, a questionnaire should always be supplemented with a personal interview. Furthermore, to identify gaps in language mastery, it might be helpful to look at some written assignments.
In Germany, we are currently facing a higher demand for German learning because we accepted so many refugees from Syria. Again, teachers should not make the mistake of anticipating needs that are non-existent. The refugees might not be interested in German culture at all. They don’t want to assimilate themselves into German culture, but they are merely seeking to obtain communication skills to be independent and survive economically.
Apart from conducting a needs analysis, there are also situation factors which need to be looked at when choosing a teaching method and curriculum content for the students. You have to take into account the kind of education the students are used to getting in their country. Is it a “learning-for-the-test”-attitude? They might need the correct grammar more urgently for a written test than conversation skills and will find it useless simply to talk in class. Especially for many education systems in Asia, it is said, that frontal teaching and memorization is a common scenario. It is important that the teacher keeps authority and give the students stronger guidance than negotiating lesson content and tasks. Taking into account the achievements of their culture and constantly memorizing them leaves little room for creativity. It might be confusing for them to have a task presented to them that requires a creative solution.
These were just some thoughts about how to adjust your teaching strategy to the learner. In times of global online teaching, which brings people from all over the world together within a second, it is easy to forget the importance of treating everybody as individuals and to take into consideration their cultural background.
Literature:
Jack C. Richards: “Curriculum Development in Language Teaching”, Cambridge University Press: 2001
Material: authentic versus created
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When I had just started teaching I was reluctant to use commercial textbooks in class, basically for two reasons: first, I had the impression the dialogues and the texts seemed somehow artificial to me, not authentic. Second, the presented topics and especially the pictures seem outdated even after a few years.
You should always keep in mind that textbooks should first and foremost facilitate the learning process and that means also to motivate the learners, something artificial, outdated material cannot fulfill.
In general, authentic material uses a natural language whereas, in a commercial textbook, tasks are designed around a specific grammar pattern or vocabulary. That might feel artificial because in real language usage the native speaker tends to vary the grammar phenomena. A grammar phenomenon never becomes accumulated to that extent. But it is also important to realize that authentic material might include complicated language or vocabulary that is too difficult and does not need to be learned by the student at that stage. Here, the created material does a good service by adapting the language to the level of the learner and following a guideline about which vocabulary should be covered at what stage. Despite the downsides of commercial textbooks mentioned above, one should not underestimate their concept.
Coming to the second point: material that is outdated. How can it be motivating to read about events that are not discussed any more? I had a textbook here talking about the threat of file-sharing for the music industry. In fact, this was a topic discussed in the past which disappeared somehow since the online streaming services started to emerge. It cannot be the goal of a textbook to just pick out short-term phenomena that are not discussed anymore after a couple of years. The topics should also be abstract enough to catch the readers’/ learners’ attention after a few years.
What is it that really moves the people? Think about 21st-century outcomes: globalization, which means cultures coming closer together. Be prepared to talk to people from the other side of the planet. Textbooks should raise cultural awareness, picking out cultural differences but also cultural universals as a central theme. Then: the technical progress, digital transformation, solving problems suddenly in a completely different way. Preparing the learner for unexpected events, raising creativity about what will happen in the future.
To sum this up, commercial textbooks can succeed above authentic materials not specifically designed for teaching purposes, but only if their concepts include three main points:
- The material should be held as authentic as possible, concerning language use as well as the topics (for example the book “Keynote” by the publisher National Geographic, that is based around the TED-talks).
- The material should be motivating, for example using modern contexts and pictures, which you can see perfectly with the book “Life”, also by the publisher National Geographic, that includes stunning pictures, so that the learner might have the impression it is not a textbook but a magazine.
- The material should focus on the aforementioned 21st-century outcomes.
Last but not least, a textbook can be a good basis for the language learning programme but the teacher should never rely 100% on the book. They should always adapt the content by selecting, modifying and supplementing it, and by doing so considering the learners’ needs.
The Bilingual Learner: Code-Switching
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What if you as a language teacher recognize code-switching in class? To which extent do you tolerate code-switching in class? How would you as a language teacher deal with code-switching learners in class?
This is what you could think about or what you might ask the bilingual person:
[1. Are you bilingual or do you talk with bilingual people often?]
2. Bilingual people are the “place” for dealing with interferences. New words can be coined through cultural contact with bilingual people. What are the conditions, what do you think is expected of bilingual people?
3. How much are you as a bilingual person aware of similarities and differences in the languages you speak? How able are you to search for equivalent words or expressions in your second language?
4. Are you as a bilingual person able to understand finer shades of meaning and can you be counted on to decide which word from the source or the target language, is more suitable in any given situation? How well are your words chosen?
5. Are you able to tell others about which words from the source language you were not able to translate?
6. To which extent are your reactions emotional or rational? Can you as a bilingual person explain your word choices?
7. Is willingness to code-switch abnormal? What are the criteria to decide if it is abnormal? When does code-switching start to feel strange?
8. Do you switch within a sentence or only when you begin speaking about a new topic or with a new conversation partner? To what extent do you as a bilingual person adapt to new conversation partner?
[9. Which other factors did you notice in a conversation with a bilingual person?]
TOP 10: How to teach/learn a new language 2018
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TOP 1: Provide an authentic language setting and terms/ topics that are acutely relevant to the student
When somebody wants to learn a new language, the most important thing for me is that the teacher is able to provide him or her with an authentic language setting. The classroom is not only for doing exercises as well as possible, but the most important thing is that the learner reacts to a question using the foreign language as if he or she really were in that situation.
For example, when you practise how to tell the time in the foreign language, you could simply ask the student really what time it is: XY, what’s the time right now?! Sometimes you feel really like the student is “waking up” from their “exercise mode” when you do so. If you are learning by yourself, you might have experienced that you can learn the declension paradigm of the personal pronouns for as long as you like, but if you do not at least once feel addressed by a speaker referring to you by “you” or in German “du” or “Sie”, you will not really be able to communicate in the foreign country or with the people speaking this language.
So, speaking remains the most important skill a coach can exercise in class. I feel role plays in the session are sometimes too artificial, but if the student can really identify with their role and it is really relevant to them, then I would go for it. Scaffolding, that means providing basic phrases they can adjust and use during the role play – I would say Ok, but they should not stick too much to the book. It is also important, in case you are doing these kinds of exercises, never to lose sight of the big picture and to tell the student the purpose of/ benefit from this exercise and why they are doing it.
TOP 2: Challenge the student, elicit new structures/ words, promote active participation
The role of the coach here is to bring the student into a situation where he really needs to apply a specific word or structure. But eliciting structures is not easy for the coach. The student might avoid using the requested word by simply replacing it with what he already knows/ can do. Here, TOP 1 comes into effect: As long as the student expresses what is personally relevant to him or her, this is still acceptable. Providing the challenge is still an important task for the coach and is crucial for enabling the student to progress.
Another context where the student can be active is providing series-making-structures or regular grammar forms where they will guess the right word/ structure by themselves, or even find out the rule for a structure by themselves. That’s a classic approach for structure driven learners. This will not only give this category of learners a successful experience but active participation also leads to better memorizing. (See also TOP 10).
TOP 3: Let the students feel their progress
You can do this by asking the same question that you asked the student at the beginning of the session at the end again and show him or her that he or she is now able to answer it. However, this should not be “used” by the teacher to show how good they are. TOP 1 remains crucial here: When the student was not at all interested in the question at the beginning of the session, they will also not feel it is helpful to know the answer to the question at the end of the lesson.
The coach is responsible to always have to general learning goal of the student in mind and guide the student carefully. But the coach should also have an overview of what the student already learned. Important for the progress of the student is also to check recently learned vocabulary/ structures from time to time and always reminding the student again about it. Repetition still remains an important neurolinguistics method for memorizing vocabulary/ structures in the foreign language. Those coaches having a bad memory please keep a protocol.
The first three points are for me the essence of all effective language sessions!
TOP 4: How to approach difficult personalities
So, you know about all the techniques and methods for your great and successful language session, but something is not working. It may happen that the student does not talk much for example. If you have the right topic for them, provide more context. Show interesting short videos or pictures that stimulate their imagination. Ask them about their opinion. Ask w-questions. Try to be an interesting “language partner” and present them their own culture in another light, for example. Examining cultural differences can always be exciting and motivating. But what if they are still not open for communication?
Some language learners are too shy because they are afraid to make mistakes. Being a patient and friendly teacher is crucial here. The relationship between the coach and the student is a relationship of trust. Communicate to them that it is definitely allowed to make mistakes in a language session. The coach can work like an “assistant” here and help the students how to express their ideas better. And if the chemistry still isn’t working? Then, I would say, it is just not working! That’s why we have so many different language coaches!
TOP 5: Motivation
That’s what coaches are there for. Feedback should always be encouraging and the coach should show the student what else they can do to intensify their learning. I strongly oppose negative feedback. During their language learning journey, the student progresses steadily and giving them feedback about the actual status of their ability to speak can only be a snapshot of their ability at any given moment. You might meet the student a year later and they are fluent and all the points you criticized are not at all relevant any more. But the negative impression the student might have about your comments still remains.
People who discourage other people by telling them they will never reach their goal and that it is impossible merely show their own personal (mental) restrictions and limitations, but not the learner’s. There are several animal aphorisms about this phenomenon. Read the story about the deaf frog here. Or think about the fact Arthur Lassen pointed out, that a bumble bee, from an aerodynamic point of view, should be unable to fly, in terms of body weight and size of wings, but because the bumble bee does not know about aerodynamics it flies anyway.
TOP 6: Use the internet to immerse yourself in the language!
I strongly endorse e-learning and edtech solutions. Here is the first great advantage of the internet: The internet gave me, as a Chinese language learner, the possibility to receive Chinese TV-channels and feel surrounded by Chinese language in audio and video formats. I could watch the news with Chinese subtitles, see easy kids’ cartoons or interesting reports or talk shows. I could listen to podcasts, Google pictures to have an idea about what something exotic would look like. Providing sufficient audio and video materials and enabling the students to immerse themselves in the language is definitely one of the great merits of the internet!
TOP 7: Connect with your coach on a mobile device!
Book a session with your coach and connect with them via mobile devices! The teacher can stay in his home country or where they like and doesn’t need to fly to your county. Same for you: you don’t need to take the time to drive to the language course location. You can really save time and money here and enjoy the flexibility. That’s another great merit of the internet. However, there are some limitations: the connection can be too slow or something does not work; the background noise on one side is disturbing the audio in the session. As a “modern” language coach in 2018, you should definitely be prepared to do some troubleshooting here as well.
TOP 8: Learn regularly, every day a little bit – with your vocabulary APP
Again, the internet has brought some relief here. You don’t need to use paper flashcards and write the new vocabulary down there, maybe writing the same word twice, because you forgot that you had already included this word in the list. A vocabulary APP will take over all this work from you and will also remind you if you put a word already into the system. Based on an algorithm that takes human neurolinguistical operations into account, the APP will now remind you about repeating vocabulary. You can also include pictures, audio and example sentences on a digital flashcard. You should definitely try to find your vocabulary APP on the web; for me it made my whole language learning process more systematic and efficient and I would definitely recommend it!
TOP 9: When the computer system motivates you: gamification
The last merit of the internet I want to mention here is that currently new interactive formats for language learning are appearing on the web. Many of them use gamification concepts to engage and motivate the learner. The basic idea is to stimulate the limbic system and let the student have fun. They can have an avatar that “grows” with the progress the student makes. Or they can “earn” badges to award them for contributions. You can see on a TOP 10 list where you are in comparison to your study mates. You can read Andreas Urban’s article about gamification 2018 here.
Much more is expected here in the coming years. The downsides of using this method, which I experienced for myself, is that you can get tired of it after a while. And you should never forget that in the end it is an information processing system that you are communicating with, and it will never be able to show empathy or build up a relationship with you.
TOP 10: Adjust your method to the learner, not the learner to the method
Last but not least, I want to emphasize here that there are definitely enough methods and techniques for teaching a foreign language and that you should never be misled by the idea that only one method could be appropriate. Each learner is an individual. One of my students wanted to learn by writing. He loved to write small funny texts and I provided him with lots of feedback.
Another student said: I want to learn by listening. Here you could use more listening comprehension techniques as a coach as well: providing the setting through context and visual information, using audios that show strong discourse, signal words and stressed expression to help the student with decoding, providing the learner with the transcript, but also with a fill-in-the-gaps exercise to challenge the learner, making it interactive by letting the student think how to respond etc. These are only some ideas on how to help a language learner type who wants to focus on aural experience.
Just one more example, but I think the idea of method diversity that should be adjusted to the student should be clear: A student who wanted to learn the language “without grammar”. As a coach, you could surely provide more fixed expressions without using complicated linguistic terms, typical ways of saying things in the language learned that can be used as frozen phrases and keep the grammar basic. Some language students simply are not linguists, maybe they are engineers or experts in a completely different field!
So these are my ideas about language learning 2018 and the role of the coach! Hope you got inspired!
10 TIPS: What German teachers and Chinese students should know when they teach/ learn German from scratch
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I would like to collect here 10 points that Chinese German learners or German teachers teaching Chinese students should know before coming to class.
Firstly, it is good to have something to break the ice in the beginning of the session. For example, if you have a student from Guangzhou, it is nice to mention that this is the “city of the goats”. Or you mention a famous scenic spot in their city that you have visited. Maybe you can talk about the Great Wall in Beijing. Show that you know something about China and show that you are interested!
Let’s start now with the teaching tips:
1. The Phonetics: Uvular “R” [ʁ] and Vowel Length
In most Chinese language teaching books you find phonetics first, so the first thing I mention should be specifics of the pronunciation. As an experienced teacher you know native speakers of which language struggle with which sounds most. For the Chinese this is the uvular “R”! Situation in class: “Ich esse (R)eis.” Was it “Eis” (“ice cream”) or “Reis” (“rice”) now? I mostly understand: Eis, which turns out to be a mistake then, because they wanted to say “Reis”. They tend to completely skip the uvular R sound, but you should encourage the Chinese learners and tell them two things:
When the “r” appears at the end like in “Mieter”, “Computer”, “lieber”, “Wasser”, they still have the option to pronounce it like [ɐ]. The sound [ɐ] is called a near-open central vowel and occurs especially when you pronounce words written with an “-er” at the end. See also the article on my blog:
When the “R” appears at the beginning of a word, they still have the option to pronounce it like the Chinese „r“ in 人 „ren“ („people“). Although this sound is made with the tongue not with the uvula, but a crucial misunderstanding can be avoided when they communicate and the pronunciation is still acceptable.
Both sounds for the letter combination “CH” are generally pronounced very well by Chinese learners, as are the umlauts (ä, ö, ü). You can really save time here, because you don’t need to use much time for explanation.
Another thing I want to mention about the pronunciation: it can be crucial to distinguish words with a long vowel from a similar word with a short vowel, for example die Mitte (“center”) – die Miete (“rent”), die Ratte (“rat”) – die Rate (“rate”), der Schall (“sound”) – der Schal (“scarf”)! A trick here is the comparison of German long vowels with the “first tone” in Chinese language and the short vowels with the “fourth tone”. We know that Chinese is a tonal language and you can use part of the features of the tones, which are, generally speaking, a modification of the central vowel in a syllable in pitch but also in length, to draw a parallel to the German vowels. I had this idea during my study at university preparing a seminar paper about Chinese phonetics: The “first tone” in Chinese is long, the “fourth tone” is short.
The last thing to mention here is that the Chinese are very good at the pronunciation of the strong “z” in German, as long as you give them the right equivalent in the Chinese language. So, I often tell them that German “zu” is pronounced like “Chinese vinegar”: 醋 “cu”!
I have even more tips about phonetics but let’s look at some other points first.
2. Writing German: Capital Letters and Small Letters
Normally writing capital letters or small letters is mostly mixed up and causes mistakes in the written text. Learning a language always means you learn it in all its aspects (listening, speaking, reading and writing). But it is not only important to tell the Chinese learner that they write the word with a capital at the beginning of a sentence, you must also tell them what actually is the beginning of a new sentence as a teacher. Do I continue writing a capital after a comma? The Chinese punctuation is also different from German, all in all there are more commas to separate main and subordinate clauses than fullstops. You do best when you go through the different punctuation marks and tell them, after which they continue writing with a capital.
Another aspect of capital letters or small letters is the ability to determine whether it is a noun or a verb/ adjective, because in German all nouns are written with a capital. So, you might also tell them, that “ich” is only a pronoun, not a noun and therefore it is written small when it doesn’t occur at the beginning of a sentence!
3. Greetings: The actual Chinese Equivalent of „Wie geht’s?”
I always wondered, why Chinese students have difficulties with the initial greeting in German: “Wie geht’s? – Danke, gut, und dir?” is just used as a greeting in a fixed form, which they only have to learn by heart. In spite of that, they never fulfill this ritual in their first few sessions. Other learners from Western countries I found more familiar with that greeting. As I tried to understand where this difficulty arises from, I remembered that the Chinese have a totally different way of initially greeting each other when they meet : 吃饭了吗 “Chi fan le ma?” (“Have you eaten already?”) Isn’t that a huge difference?
My tip is to consequently exercise phrases like “Wie geht es dir?”, but also “danke” and “bitte”, because you will hardly find a direct pragmatic equivalent for these expressions in Chinese. The Chinese have an equivalent for “danke” (谢谢 “xiexie”), yes, but they just don’t use it to that extent, that’s the point! Remind them that when they learn German, they have to use the corresponding German expressions much more often!
Another example for an absolute German beginner’s expression without direct equivalent in Chinese is “ja” and “nein”. Normally, when you answer a question in Chinese you repeat the sentence or only the verb in the positive or negated form. So, it is important always to encourage the student to use the forms mentioned here in point 3!
4. Stating their Nationality
Normally you want to teach the students how to introduce themselves in German in the beginning. That involves also stating their nationality. And here occurs another problem:
It seems easy just to say: I am Chinese. But in German, there are different forms to do so, depending on your gender and number of people.
You say:
“Ich bin Chines-e.” When you are one single Chinese man.
“Ich bin Chines-in.” When you are one person, but a woman.
“Wir sind Chines-en.” When you are in a group of male/female people!
My experience is that Chinese beginners are lost and cry for help: In Chinese, you only use one single form that is 中国人 “Zhongguoren”. Generally speaking, the Chinese noun doesn’t show a plural or a gender. This makes studying Chinese for German native speakers much easier, because they don’t have to learn irregular forms of the noun, but when you put it the other way around, Chinese learners learning German, then you see, the declension of nouns is an additional feature Chinese have to learn and takes much effort. I will say more about nouns and declensions under point 9!
As I said, Chinese nouns “in general” don’t show plural or gender. But there are certain words which do so and you should pick an example of them to explain to the Chinese why the noun changes (Chinese, Chinesin, Chinesen). Look at 公狼 “gong-lang” (male wolf) and 母狼 “mu-lang” (female wolf), these Chinese words have a prefix “gong” for male and “mu” for female. You can tell your Chinese students, it is the same in German language, just it is not a prefix (syllable at the beginning of the word) but a suffix (syllable at the end of the word): When you want to emphasize that a person is female you put an “-in” at the end of the word. That’s a common feature you can definitely use to make the German structure easier to understand for Chinese students!
5. Given Names: Male or Female?
The situation is the following: We are doing exercises how to describe a person (name, nationality, job, family etc.), and the students do a fill-in-the-gap exercise about a person named Marion. Suddenly, the Personal Pronoun “er” (“he”) is mentioned by a student to describe her. I first thought they are confusing personal pronouns but then I found out, that it is not clear to them the name “Marion” stands for a woman. This can happen to anybody hearing names from different cultures and not being able to decide if it’s a female name or a male name. See also my article here.
This is just one more example of a thing that you take for granted but that turns out to be something unusual or unknown in Chinese eyes!
6. The Family System
As Chinese is a Sino-Tibetic language, the family tree looks much more complicated than the German, which is an Indoeuropean language.
For example, “Onkel” (“uncle”) in Chinese can be 舅父 “jiufu” (brother of your mother) or 伯父 “bofu” (brother of your father), or 姨父 “yifu” (husband of the sister of your mother) or 姑父 „jifu“ (husband of the sister of your father), but you find also 堂伯（叔） „tangbo (shu)“, 堂姨夫 „tangyifu“, 堂舅父 “tangjiufu”, 表舅 “biaojiu” and 表姨夫 „biaoyifu“ for more distantly related uncles. So, actually I found nine expressions for “uncle” in Chinese (I had to look it up to be honest), whereas there is only one in German for all. Not to forget the nicknames, as a European you might be really confused when somebody in China tells you about family relatives!
So, first it is important to be aware of that as a German teacher. Remember to include 兄弟姐妹 xiong di jie mei, the older brother, the younger brother, the older sister, the younger sister, when you are talking about “Geschwister” (“siblings”) in German! Secondly I definitely recommend telling the Chinese students at this point, how easy German can be! They should be glad! They will have enough difficulties with conjugation and declension later!
I also want to mention the one-child-policy and two-child-policy here as a Chinese phenomenon. For a specific generation in China it is just obvious that they don’t have siblings, because during that time, couples were allowed to have only one child!
7. The Number System
A Chinese person once said to me, in China 万 „wan“ (10 000) (sounds like „one“) is an endless amount, but “one” (1) in English is sooo tiny! He might be right, when one only listens to the pronunciation, but in fact there is much linguistics behind it!
Generally you must think of larger dimensions when it comes to China. Asking for the population of a city or even the whole country comes easy to 5 (Nanjing) or 25 million (Shanghai) or you are talking about 1.3 billion for whole of China. So, when you talk about larger numbers with Chinese, it is good to know that they have another counting system, mostly based on 万 “wan” (10 000) and 亿 “yi” (100 000 000). Actually, the whole system, based on “wan” and “yi” can be very difficult to translate sometimes. (Personally, I always start counting the zeros and bundle them into four). So please compare:
wan = 1 0000 = 10 000 ten thousand
shi wan (ten „wan“) = 10 0000 = 100 000 hundred thousand
bai wan (hundred „wan“) = 100 0000 = 1 000 000 one million
qian wan (thousand “wan”) = 1000 0000 = 10 000 000 ten million
yi = 1 0000 0000 = 100 000 000 hundred million
shi yi (ten “yi”) = 10 0000 0000 = 1 000 000 000 = a billion
As a result, the Chinese say their population is 13 “yi”, and then you can add eight zeros (13 0000 0000 = 1 300 000 000), so in English this would be 1,3 billion!
When talking about numbers, one should also mention the Chinese lucky numbers: The idea is, to replace words representing a good thing with their number homophones, like in 发财 “facai” (“become rich”) pronounced in Guangzhou dialect is “ba”, sounds the same as “8”. So, numbers containing an eight are lucky numbers and they appear everywhere, in prices, in hotel room numbers, telephone numbers, even in the greeting “88” (= “ba ba” sounds like “bye bye”).
8. First Grammar Rules: Conjugation of Verbs
When you then come to the first action verbs to describe activities (machen – to do, trinken – to drink etc.) you will soon find out that the Chinese cannot conjugate. To dig a bit deeper into the linguistics, it should be said that the Sino-Tibetic language family is not an inflected language family as such, whereas the Indoeuropean languages are inflected languages. That simply means that in Chinese a conjugation paradigm for the verb or a paradigmatic case-system for the declension of nouns in Chinese simply does not exist.
So, please, tell them really from scratch, that there is a stem of the verb (Chinese “ci gan” 词干) and that you put an ending (Chinese “ci wei” 词尾) at the verb stem depending on the grammatical person you speak of. Illustrate it with lots of examples and keep it really as basic as you can. Some Chinese might have heard of this phenomenon “donci-bianwei” 动词变位，or “xingtai-bianhua” 形态变化(maybe from learning English) and also might have a quick grasp of it in the beginning, but at later stages you see, that they don’t take “learning irregular verb forms” serious enough. Learning the stem forms is just what you have to do daily when you learn an Indoeuropean language!
9. Declension of Nouns
You will also have nouns to introduce in the first sessions (der Mann – the man, die Frau – the woman, das Auto – the car). But what’s with all the articles in German (der, die, das)? So here is the declension system, which every Chinese speaker who learns German must know, with Chinese expressions.
Masculine, yang xing阳性
Feminine, yin xing阴性
Neuter, zhong xing中性
Plural, fu shu复数
Nominative, di yi ge第一格
Genitive, di er ge第二格
Dative, di san ge第三格
Accusative, di si ge第四格
By the way, it is good when you know the Chinese linguistic terms to describe the grammar, because I found the Chinese more comfortable with it: I had a student who knew 阳性 “yangxing”, but did not remember “masculine” for nouns.
Sometimes, I start doing „marketing“ for German grammar: See, we only have one plural for all genders, no masculine plural, feminine plural and neuter plural! I find it always good to show them how easy it can be, depending on the perspective.
10. Cultural Specific Small Talk Topics
Finally, I want to mention here that learning German conversation patterns is one thing, but finding an equivalent in the Chinese language is another thing, as we have already seen in point 3 (“Wie geht’s?” and吃饭了吗 “Chi fan le ma?” (“Have you eaten already?”) ). What I want to focus on is that the conversation topics, for example when making small talk, are completely different. Generally, I found the topic of the weather not so popular in China, maybe it is also not a very cheerful topic because the big cities are shrouded in smog.
A little conversation about the do’s and don’ts in German small talk situations will be in order here: Don’t mention money (income), age (of a women), also a person’s health status is personal and other such things are good for them to know.
Another thing I found in the German teaching books was the sentence: “Wohin fährst du im Sommer?” (“Where do you go in summer?”) and here it is good to know that most of the Germans take their annual leave in summer in fact, whereas the Chinese peak travel times are in spring (spring festival chunjie 春节, and in October guoqingjie 国庆节! So, it happened, when I was working with the books with Chinese students, that they could not understand what is meant by this question. Only when I told them, it is actually all about holiday, did they cotton on.
I have lots more examples for non-equivalent language expressions or cultural specific content in workbooks which seem to be obvious, but which actually require an explanation for Chinese beginners.
The Linguistic Snake ~~ 