Worse than Grading Sloppy English
March 7th, 2006 by MarkI used to think there was nothing in the world worse than grading a third grader’s sloppy English. I was very, very wrong. As a semi literate lăowài, I can tell you that grading a 2nd grader’s sloppy Chinese is much worse. I brought it on myself, I suppose. My school’s normal curriculum does include some translation tests, to ensure that the kids know what the heck they’re talking about as opposed to just manipulating grammatical structures, but not that many. The majority of the tests involve answering English questions in English.
Due to the influence of the L2 acquisition research I’ve been reading, I had the oh so brilliant idea of focusing on comprehension tests for my experimental 2nd grader program. Instead of spending the time it would take to get little kids (who can’t even write the letters of the alphabet reliably) to write out answers in English on quizzes, I give only spelling quizzes (in which phonetic equivalents are accepted), and English to Chinese translations. In other words, the kids have to know be able to comprehend it when I say “a police officer” and write “警察“, but they don’t have to be able to write out “police officer”. Obviously, since this is an English class and not a Chinese class, I let them write 注音 whenever they don’t know how to write the character.
There are definite advantages to this approach. The kids can acquire vocabulary much more quickly, since the focus is all on aural comprehension. Once their writing skills have developed a bit more, then they can start writing. There is a HUGE down side, though. Grading sucks. About a third of these little guys have ATROCIOUS Chinese handwriting, and they nearly all make frequent Chinese mistakes. Of course I’m not going to take points for Chinese mistakes, but even their zhùyīn is wrong sometimes. It makes grading… interesting. Single words aren’t too bad, but the sentences are killing me.
Here’s the sort of thing I often see:
The first time I saw this, I just thought, “Sorry, kid. You’re mother tongue ain’t that easy.” I had assumed that he had replaced the medicine character with the character for “one”. The Chinese word for doctor is 醫生, which is obviously much harder to write than 一生. Heck, I think I tried to write it as 一生 once or twice in my first semester of Chinese. Actually, though, he didn’t write the wrong character. He just wrote the zhùyīn for the sound “yī” so big that it looked like a character.
Here, is an even simpler mistake to understand, but ultimately a much worse class of mistake to have to deal with when grading. Basically, Taiwanese people have really messed up pronunciation of Mandarin. Most have troubles differentiating between “zi” and “zhi”, “si” and “shi”, “ci” and “chi”, “ru” and “lu”, “er” and “e”, and a host of other sounds which involve curling the tongue. This student had meant to write “尸ㄨㄓㄨㄛ”, or “shūzhuō”, which means desk. However, due to her constant exposure to a heavy Taiwanese accent, she thought it was “尸ㄨㄗㄨㄛ”, or “shūzuō”. I’m sure grading stuff that little kids write is a little bit of a pain, even for locals. But with my Chinese skills, which admittedly fall short of literacy, it’s a pain. Not only do I have read in Chinese, which is slow for me, but I also have to guess what the kids meant when they make mistakes.
March 7th, 2006 at 4:55 am
I know what you mean with that Taiwanese si, shi thing. As a person with pretty poor Chinese skills (which i WILL rectify when i go back!!), i would find this confusing. Are they saying 4 or 10. arrggghh
March 7th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. I’ve frequently heard locals “over-correcting”, i.e., pronouncing 4 as shì. At least once or twice a month I’ll see Taiwanese people at my school having to use hand gestures to ask for clarification about whether other Taiwanese people have just said 4 or 10.
As for myself, I totally ignore whether if they juănshé (curl their tongue) or not. I just go by the tone. It works. People here obviously can communicate with each other (though I’ve read studies that say they have to ask for more clarifications between native speakers than English or German speakers do). The thing that sucks as a foreign learner is that the total number of distinct sounds is decreased, which means we have to rely even more on context.
March 8th, 2006 at 1:18 am
Ha! I love how you didn’t even bother to mention that the first kid wrote ㄘㄚ on #11 and the second kid wrote ㄔㄚ. Either, you’re showing remarkable restraint or else your own Chinese has been fucked over by living in Taiwan so long. You should blog about this stuff more. It’s been several years since I was in Taiwan, but this post sure brings back the memories.
-Jake
March 10th, 2006 at 12:45 am
How funny and disturbing at the same time haha. I haven’t been THAT fortunate to correct something like that in the longest time.
Yeah, they need to work on their Chinese skills equally as they put on English. Probably the same as many 1st or 2nd graders in English speaking countries.
March 10th, 2006 at 1:16 am
That’s for sure, JT. Zhuyin is a little weird in a few ways. ㄔ (which sounds like “chir”), ㄨ (sounds like “oo” from “boot”), and ㄥ (which sounds like “ung” from “lung”). When you put ㄔㄨㄥ together it’s pronounced as “choang” not as “chir-oo-ung”. Still at the syllable level, zhuyin is totally consistent.
English phonics, on the other hand, seem to have been designed by a crack-smoking madman. Even after learning fifty or so phonics rules and hundreds of morphemes, it’s only possible to know how to spell about 75% of the new words we hear correctly. There’s no good reason “swallow” and “fallow” don’t rhyme. A total language geek might be able to beat the rest of us by asking,
or some similarly ridiculous questions.
The issue for these little kids is different though. Their problem is just that their parents’, all of their friends’, and all of their acquaintance’s Mandarin has been heavily influenced by Minnan. As Jake so clearly pointed out, I have the same problem.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
I think for ㄘㄚ and ㄔㄚ, their Chinese school teachers really need to take up the responsibility for this matter. This is way, way beyond the English teacher’s concern.(I just pisses me off if I EVER have to correct their Chinese pronunciations.) Or maybe you can get a part-time teaching them Zhuyin. (You’ll sure be in the news and maybe get bashed by some “Taiwanese Bastards” that you’d be glad to meet!? lol)
March 10th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not my job to correct their zhuyin. It’s just that grading the listening comprehension sections of their quizes is more difficult when their first language is still a bit shaky. I’m still pleased with the results of comprehension based exercises, though.
March 12th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Hey Mark,
I answered your question the best I could. Go check it out…
September 23rd, 2006 at 10:30 am
haha this is funny
I suppose anyone learning a foreign language would have this problem… the local accent is just not the same with what u leaned from text books!
I am a taiwanese studying in Australia, and i remember how frustrated i was trying to understand the Aussie accent…
September 23rd, 2006 at 4:25 pm
But Amy, Mandarin isn’t a foreign language for my students. They’re all Taiwanese kids. Unfortunately for them, the accent most common in Taiwan confuses several Mandarin sounds, that the elementary school textbooks keep distinct.
September 23rd, 2006 at 11:45 pm
LOL i have to say its a bit worrying, making that kind of mistake…(”doctor” vs “life”.. XD)
Maybe the use of msn and internet is really corrupting the literacy/language skills of the next generation …
(but i must confess..when i was in elementary school, I found it was Really hard to distinguish between “ㄣ” and “ㄥ”. Well, i still can’t tell their difference easily now :p)