The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/135206
FEATURES Why Chinese? Claire Nevill looks at the challenges for the teaching Mandarin in schools anguage learning must be enriching and we must all be thinking beyond these shores,' says Katharine Carruthers, Director of the IoE Confucius Institute for Schools and a pioneer of the development of Mandarin teaching in the UK. Growing up in Guildford in the late 1970s, she was intrigued by the Far East as it emerged from the Cultural Revolution and decided to study Chinese at university. 'My teacher was horrified and that made me want to do it even more!' she says. More than three decades later, there is increasing demand for Chinese speakers in the UK, to compete in a globalised economy. One in four employers rates Mandarin as an essential skill for today's young people, placing it fourth behind German, French and Spanish (CBI/Pearson report 2012). So is the world's most widely spoken language finally being considered as a serious option in mainstream education? In a recent YouGov poll, commissioned by the British Council and HSBC bank, only three percent of primary and nine percent of secondary teachers said their schools offer Mandarin. 'China is a growing part of everyone's life. Children see their parents going off to the Far East and they want to be a part of it too. The focus needs to be to get it offered in mainstream education,' says Carruthers. Much is being done to raise the profile of Chinese culture and to help schools to bring it into their classrooms. HSBC and the British Council currently provide primary schools with 'snakes and dragons' education packs, run Chinese summer schools and hold an annual Mandarin Speaking Competition for secondary pupils who make the effort to master the language from scratch. The approach is helping but government policy isn't hitting the mark when it comes to L 24 The Linguist JUNE/JULY encouraging take-up of minority languages, says Vicky Gough, Languages Advisor at the British Council. 'It's fantastic that Mandarin is included as one of the seven languages recommended by the government, but they are still expecting schools to take the lead,' she says. 'The danger is that most schools will choose French rather than more imaginative options like Mandarin, Arabic or Portuguese.' Out of the starting blocks According to the latest figures, nearly all primary schools now offer language teaching within class time, yet there are huge variations in approach and quality (see page 14). In a quarter of primary schools, no member of staff has language competence higher than GCSE. In the case of Mandarin, many teachers are learning alongside their pupils, basing lessons on the wealth of online resources available. The Institute of Education (IoE) now plans to research the models of Chinese teaching at primary level to see what is working. A decade ago, Carruthers built an e-forum, which today connects around 600 Chinese teachers. 'I was working as a Chinese teacher in a Cambridge school and had no one to talk to. I was very much on my own and so I started a virtual staffroom, a few pages of resources, and then it grew from there. In March 2004 we had our first conference to share knowledge among Chinese teachers.' She became Director of the first schoolsbased Confucius Institute, based at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), in 2006. The three pressing issues on their agenda were lack of materials, lack of teachers and accreditation. 'Our first mission was to tackle exams,' Carruthers explains. 'The e-forum served as a pressure group on EdExcel – we stripped exam papers and made them more accessible.' They went on to win a bid with Pearson to publish a new set of GCSE Chinese textbooks in 2009. Since then, Mandarin has become an increasingly popular choice at GCSE. In September, the IoE conducted a survey of Chinese exam results, which showed that while the standard at GCSE is peaking, it is dropping off at AS-level. Of the 98 pupils who took the AS-level last year, 75 percent were native Chinese. 'The Mandarin AS-level is incredibly difficult,' says Linying Liu, Head of Mandarin at Kingsford Community School. 'Even native speakers find it a really challenging exam. Most schools don't offer it as they are worried about students falling short of their university grades.' Many independent schools and colleges instead offer the Cambridge Pre-U – a broader, one-year course designed to give students the skills to survive in a Chinese environment. 'The Cambridge Pre-U exam provides a good bridge between GCSE and university,' says Carruthers. 'It essentially gives schools a choice.' Changing methods Nishat Ali puts her current status, as a fourthyear Chinese Studies undergraduate at SOAS, down to the interesting classes at Kingsford. 'When we all started learning Chinese as a compulsory subject in Year 7, no one knew anything about China or Chinese – many of us just associated it with takeaways! But I quickly came to love it, as we did so much in classes. Calligraphy, making Chinese lanterns, and learning about the culture, as well as the language, was really fun.' www.iol.org.uk