Mandarin in secondary school?

[Greythorne]

There's a big debate going on at our school (France) about whether Mandarin is going to be useful or not.

Obviously, there are those who think it is an absolute must as trade with China is going to increase in importance and that is will be much more useful thqn German (which is the MFL most often offered after English here(.

Whilst I agree with that, I did read an article (possibly in The Guardian, but can't find it now) which argued that as all educated Chinese will be speaking excellent English going forward, the really is little point especially as:

-- it takes years and years to reach a decent level
-- there simply are not enough teachers of Mandarin and so there's a reliance on student teachers who come on one year exchange programmes (no continuity)
-- the cultural barriers are so high for Euopeans that even with a few years of language learning, they will never be able to compete with Chinese students / adults who have been immersed in Western culture via media / formal learning for years

I don't want to take an anti-learning position, but I really am veering towards the idea that learning Mandarin is a pointless exercise.

Can someone please convince me?

We have a whiteboard in the kitchen. DCs are required to write their homework on it and to strike it through when its done. So, guilty as charged m'lud.

Cortina I am guilty of spreading our resources too thinly too. Value margarine springs to mind. From time to time I reassess and reign us all in, before the slow build up starts again.

DD is today off school. I think she is just exhausted. She is in all the school sports teams, sings in the choir, is taking the part of Ariel in the end of year play....then there's all the stuff outside of school.

During our Easter holiday we need to sit down and decide what will stay and what will go. Or find another way of working it all.

What I do know though, is that Mandarin has no place in our schedule . Not because I don't think it would be aq nice thing to learn, but because I don't think its benefits would outweigh any of our current commitments.

But Cortina is that cultural or is it economic, ie that the parents or grandparents have a memory of poverty that pushes them to keep their children out of poverty? I remember reading something in a newspaper that claimed that children of the Chinese middle classes are rebelling against their parents and their demands as they move further away from impoverished roots. Unfortunately I can't find the article now

Bonsoir, C1 is the equivalent level of a UK doctorate .

We have completely derailed the thread!

I'm ethic chinese and I agree that a lot of chinese parents are like those tiger mums on tv, but a bit less extreme. Compared to my kiwi counterpart, whose parents seem to only care if they are happy. However, I don't want to be a tiger mum myself and simply want my daughter to be happy.

I grew up with migrant parents in NZ, and my experience is that by the time we reach university, the white kiwi students are smarter and harder working. They are there doing a degree because they want to. They don't need someone with a stick sitting with them to do homework. (I did engineering so that could be a self selected sample). The average chinese kid in my peer group didn't do very well at university, mostly finishing without any honours. Also, none of us had done any paid work during our school years or while at university. So it's a massive shock when you finally need to look for a job.

I think we non-chinese, chinese tiger mothers, don't place all our eggs in the academic studies basket. We believe that it takes many skills to succeed in life

pickledsiblings - if you learn MFL contained within a national education system, you rarely get anywhere. MFL teaching flourishes outside the school sytem, however. The market for teaching of MFL is huge.

interesting thread. I think dc could really enjoy learning Mandarin at school and immersion at primary would be most effective. Whether you enjoy learning a language is very often down to whether you like the teacher and whether the teacher is enthusiastic IMO more than the particular merits a language might have.

If I were to learn Mandarin, I would learn it because I am interested in the culture and everyone knows Chinese culture goes back a great way and is enormously rich. I would have fun decoding it and learning about the characters and how they came to be formed.Personally I have a blockage with Mandarin because I think I could not manage the tonal part of it effectively.

If we teach Mandarin at school, it will be insufficient to aid anyone in working in a high level job in China. Realistically on top of the school studies, you would need to plan on your dc spending a year or two in a Mandarin speaking environment to polish those skills and become truly proficient. Perhaps some time of a gap year solution.

some type of a gap...

A lot of this debate might be academic if your schools can't get good Mandarin teachers.

Our school finds it very hard to get Mandarin teachers who can teach well, have sufficient grasp of English and can keep discipline (as they aren't allowed to hit the students).

We live in Asia, I suspect it would be even harder in Europe to find the right teachers.

Surely to put it in context: you are not a mathematician/chemist/physicist/whatever after you get an A at GCSE level (or at A-level. Or are they the same thing? Mugging up on English education system as I go along and we're not at that level yet). But you have a foundation to build on. Why should you expect to be an expert in a language at that level?

"The average chinese kid in my peer group didn't do very well at university, mostly finishing without any honours."

If all Chinese kids were naturally clever then Chinese takeaways would have no workers since they would all be holding down graduate level jobs :)

So could it be that your peer group wasn't particularly clever as opposed to the tiger mom approach having a negative effect on them?

Conchita, a bit of both I think. No one seems to speak about the last 4,000 years of Western history the with same reverence the Chinese speak about their history. The Chinese generally have a great respect about the old ways of doing things. If a child does badly or behaves poorly they let down the wider community. It generally doesn't work that way in Western culture.

In China I believe they recruit teachers from the top 10% of graduates - teaching is an esteemed profession.

Empire I believe you are right. When I was in Asia it was the same. When I asked why it was so hard to recruit a teacher said 'the thing is the Chinese don't believe that some students are just low ability and can't learn things'. Hmm, I thought.

What was very interesting about the Amy Chua book, was that it never occurred to her that her DC couldn't do the things asked of them. She assumed that a. they were robust enough to survive the training schedules and b. that with enough training they could achieve anyhting.

These two assumptions are counter intuitive to many middle class western parents.

wordfactory I would be very interested in that thread.

To be honest language teaching at most state schools is dire, far better to pick it up outside, BUT if it's a language which engages your average insolent 13yo then that's a good thing. Language learning isn't purely about proficiency.

Quite, Wordfactory, I wish I could like your post as you are absolutely spot on.

I've lost count of the amount of people who have said to me 'of course Amy's daughters were only able to achieve as they did because they have an IQ of 150 plus' and other comments in the same vein.

Children really are more capable and more robust than so many seem to think. I read this which I found inspiring:

Thoughts to keep in mind re: your children

You don't know until you try

You still don't know if you didn't finish

You can can complete this project/school assignment/sport season etc because any normal child can and you are a 'normal child'

You learn nothing if (Mum, Dad, significant adult) does it for you

Come and ask for help if you really need it - otherwise you are doing fine

Quitting in the middle is not an option - this doesn't negate changing direction but too many directional changes constitutes quitting

Manners - these are still important - please say thank you, please etc

Also like this written by an employer. Sorry a bit o/t but with some relevance:

Tiger Mum - you gave me and adult who can't think for herself. She can't work without being micro-managed and I don't have time to micro-manage her like her Mum.

When she does get moving on a project she can never seem to complete it because it's never perfect and any constructive criticism is so traumatic that I have to battle to see a partially complete project.

Why didn't you let her do her own work? Why didn't you let her see how to grow by learning from her teacher? How can I gauge that she's working in the correct direction if I can't see a prototype?

So your straight A child is ineffective and now has some real life lessons to learn.

Western Mum - you gave me a child that can't seem to stick to anything. She is so full of herself and thinks 'doing her best' is good enough.

She's heard the words 'nice try' 'good job' for every missed goal etc. Then when she wasn't successful (because she never tried) you let her quit!

Her science project looked just like Mount Vesuvius because that is the box it came out of and even that she had Dad create in the garage whilst she watched cartoons. I can see her potential every now and again, but she quickly sinks into her self-absorbed nature and quits more often than she completes a project.

fraktal

It's here www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/1433557-What-skills-do-you-prioritise-consider-of-highest-importance-for-your-DC

Interesting reading.

I agree with wordfactory. In the end, very little of what one learns at school proves 'useful' in the longer run. One needs to specialise and learn to a far higher level if the elementary introductions to subjects one gets at school turn into something of value later. So the answer, presumably then, is that one does it for its own sake - for the pleasure, enjoyment and enrichment gained from learning anything which sparks our interest. And you never know when it might be of relevance later - answering questions on University Challenge, for instance?

I didn't know they gave out free satsumas at school.

There will be many many children in 10 years time with a Mandarin GCSE, but that's pretty pointless tbh, other than to help you navigate your way around if you go to China on your hols. There will remain very very few people who speak mandarin to a level that they can use for business with Chinese non-English speakers which is what most parents seem to intend.

I am sceptical about the critical importance of it when taught in schools for a few hrs a week-

• If you're going to work in China in a mandarin speaking environment, you'll most probably need to be able to write it. One of the reasons that the Chinese education system is so focused on rote learning is that the alphabet is non-phonetic- it's just thousands of symbols that require memorisation and replication. It takes years and that's what Chinese children spend their primary education doing. That is a massive commitment.

• The Chinese have basically accepted English as the global business language and anyone with any education who is likely to be involved in international business will speak it fluently.

• If you get to 18 and cant speak mandarin and it's become critical, you can just go live there for two years (NGO work) and get a Chinese bf/gf. Sorted. All my friends who are fluent got fluent through immersion in China and the vast majority are married to a Chinese person.

• The skills gap will close so opportunities for westerners in China will be few by the time our children get to working age.

I know this is not a popular opinion, and for what it's worth, yes, my kids will take mandarin classes given that we're just across the border, BUT I am super-sceptical about the adoption of mandarin as a business language over English. On that note, my addition to WF's life skills thread is to capitalise on your massive advantage as a native English speaker and learn to write/ speak English properly so that you don't write "I could of" or "You're flight arrives at 10" and look like an illiterate dick to your Chinese boss who has to correct you.

Remember: Grammar is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit

I agree that learning Mandarin in school with the usual success rate of MFL attainment in schools is not going to get you a high paid job in China or working with Chinese business connections. If that is the main aim, I wouldn't think it worth doing. I think it would be a nice change from French for a lot of dc though.

One of the points I made much earlier up the thread is that mandarin can suit children who find the traditional languages more difficult. Surely the aim should be to provide a wider variety of languages so that all children have the chance to choose a language that they are likely to pass a GCSE in so they at least have the basics in another language.
Though personally I think that getting an A to C at GCSE gives you the basis on which you can develop a not fluent, but get by level of language with a small amount of effort on your part. I struggled terribly with French at school (dyslexic) however, through hard work got a B at GCSE. I have then have had holidays in France and have worked to improve my Spoken and written French to a level which I can have conversations and carry out basic business in the language. I am not grammatically perfect, but people understand me and appreciate the effort I go to.
This is the I would like to have my DD to have in whatever language(s) she chooses at GCSE. As I said earlier for her mandarin really hits the button currently where as all her spanish teacher can say is " well shes enthusisastic".

Richman have to disagree with you on the point where you need to not only speak but read chinese to land a job in China. My cousin grew up in Australia and is a native cantonese speaker. She now works in Hong Kong. Her job requires her to speak in cantonese because that's the language of her team. But they accepted the fact she can't read or write it. (She can't even read a restaurant menu). She does work in a very large multinational technology company listed in the states (it's the one that has three letters as its name). She said there are emails that sometimes she can't read. But all the business emails and documents are always in English.

The situation in China is not comparable to HK.

Because of its Colonial past English is widely spoken. For decades the senior jobs in the Business sector were reserved for Brits, Americans and Europeans despite the fact that the locals were coming home with degrees from US, Canadian and British universities.

China doesn't have this colonial past so this reverance for all things white doesn't exist. They have their own people coming home with degrees from Western universities so why would they employ a Westerner that had a passable language skill but who couldn't read or write reports?

. May be in 20 years time but not here and now.

Another point going slightly off topic is that any child can learn any language if it's introduced early enough. If I weren't a native English speaker I sure as hell would be introducing it from the cradle. I've seen it done with astounding results. If there were a case to be made for Mandarin becoming an equal to English on the world stage I would do the same. Waiting until school age is a wasted opportunity IMO