Testing a child's level of Mandarin

[MayfairMummy]

We've just had a lovely chinese au pair join us. She's not here specifically to teach the kids chinese, but we'd like to give her a bonus if they do actually learn something (within 6 months; she may not be able to stay longer). However this means we need to give her a 'target' so she knows what she's 'working' towards. the kids are 3 (with a very basic understanding of chinese already from a previous au pair who used to speak it), and 6 (effectively no chinese). We're only focused on spoken word at the moment.

Any idea where i can find something/one that would be suitable to assess young children's level of chinese, and is 'definable' in terms of a target to the au pair. Central london based....

TIA

You want your aupair to cram your 3 year old for a test . I think you have set a new record in the pushy parenting stakes.

This is bizarre, I am sorry OP. A target?! So if your 6 year old doesn't pick up the language as quick as your 3 year old, she will forfeit a bonus??

The younger the child the quicker they will pick up another language.

I think you need to set sensible guidelines about how often and in what situations she will be using Mandarin with your kids, and give her a bonus if she sticks to that.

If you want her to teach Mandarin OTOH then you need to pay her private tutor's rates.

I have bilingual children (in fact one of them is now trilingual) and I can tell you that the rate of acquisition is largely determined by the child not the teacher. Of course almost all children are capable of becoming bilingual, but some will pick up a foreign language quite well with just a short period of immersion. Others require much longer. It is not appropriate to base your au pair's pay on this - in fact it is quite wrong IMO.

We've got three sets of cards (described as a Chinese dictionary). Are you after general vocab, or sentences?? If vocab, she could look at flashcards with them?

I am paying the au pair well - she does not need to speak with the children in mandarin unless she wants to. Her current university study is with regard to children learning foreign languages and she would like to use our children for her studies!

It is not a matter of having 'lessons' so much as having occasional conversations/games in mandarin.... unlike most of the foreign au pairs around here who speak with their child solely in their own language, I think my 6 year old will relate better to the au pair if she speaks in english. IF she wants to add some mandarin, we would like to give her a bonus. She's not spending any extra time, just chatting in both mandarin and english around the dinner table .... I'd like to do something to say thank you for this, and personally i think that at her age, a monetary bonus is probably the nicest thing! But ... telling someone they can have a bonus without telling them what exactly for is a bit foolish IMO. Having said that, my challenge is obviously that i'm not sitting my 3 year old down for an exam, as dolcelattelover seems to think (I get a bit excitable on too much caffeine too, dolce), but I would like to be able to define how/when she gets her bonus.... current thoughts are that they have a chat with one of my chinese friends (who they both know well), and that my friend is prepped with a preprepared set of vocab... probably based on Youth Chinese Test ... unless anyone has better ideas?

Addictedtosugar ... the flashcards are a good idea, but at the moment my little one is learning his alphabet at school (and i know they push them), so i'm keen not to make it any 'lessons' - just fun; yesterday the au pair was only eating foods that were the colour they were telling her in chinese :-)