(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

I have just been irked by this on BBC news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4756886.stm

- particularly this claim:

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, said it was important to encourage the study of Chinese so the UK could trade effectively with China. [...] But [...t]he evidence from schools was that the exams were far too hard for non-native speakers, he insisted. The head of modern languages at another leading public school had gone so far as to say it was "impossible" for English speakers to get the top grades. And Ann Martin, who teaches Mandarin at the Ashcombe School in Dorking, Surrey, has said: "Head teachers are reluctant to timetable Chinese because it is not achievable for non-native speakers."

I think this is much too strong. Unless the exams have become significantly harder over the last 17 years (and I really can't think why they would; the majority of candidates were native speakers then as well), I would say that GCSE Mandarin Chinese is entirely achievable (at the highest grades) for non-native speakers. Chinese was the first GCSE I took, when I was 14, and I obtained an A (then the highest possible grade). It was quite hard work, though - certainly harder than all my other GCSEs, and possibly harder than all my A levels.

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

And, TBH, given that it's a language whose written and spoken forms are both so thoroughly alien, I don't see a problem with GCSE Mandarin being very very difficult - a GCSE in a language other than English should represent a particular standard in the target language without particular regard for the difficulty of achieving that standard, IMO.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I could see that either way -- if it's significantly harder, fewer people may be doing it, though they'll have to get to an acceptable standard eventually.

For that matter, I don't know where you would make the cutoff, but isn't it cheating to take a language GCSE in your native tongue? If they have much literary component, no, but what I remember from french was that it was grammar and vocab that would in english be trivial for me if I'd happened to have had any teaching.

But otherwise, yes. They suggest problems, but not any way of dealing with them other than ignoring them. How about teaching it earlier?

[atreic.livejournal.com]

isn't it cheating to take a language GCSE in your native tongue?

Yeah, but you're going to have to take every other GCSE, from science, to maths, to geography, in English, and your English GCSE is going to be much harder than the French GCSE is for English kids - weighed up against that sort of disadvantage giving people a free A* in their native language doesn't really matter in the great scheme of things.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

True, I hadn't thought of it like that; and to the extent that a GCSE measures knowledge threshold rather than knowledge gained it makes sense. I guess there's no actual problem there.

[mangosteen]

And, TBH, given that it's a language whose written and spoken forms are both so thoroughly alien[...]

I actually found Mandarin's utter alienness to be an advantage, as you are relieved of the illusion that you should know something about a foriegn language, just because it happens to use the roman character set.

The interesting thing about Mandarin is that while the characters are a new twist on things, and the tonality can be hard to learn, the grammar is refreshingly simple and, compared to other more popular-to-learn foreign languages, comparatively consistent. Honestly? French was harder.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I agree that Mandarin syntax is very simple to learn, and that the pronunciation takes a bit of mastering for a native English speaker (but isn't insuperable) - but it was the characters that really made the difference for me, making Mandarin vastly more difficult (in terms of amount of relatively arbitrary Stuff to be memorised) than any Indo-European language I've ever studied. But then again, I find grammar - especially inflectional morphology - very easy to learn, while some people find that the most challenging part of language learning.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

It puts people in a dilemma though - by the time you're applying to university (unless you're actually going to read chinese) no-one cares about what your GCSEs are, they just look at whether they're 11 A*s or 10A*s and a C. If you jump up and down and say "it was only a C because it was Really Really Difficult" you just look whiney. I'd like to see GCSEs at least attempt to be a uniform level of difficulty. If nothing else, you're still only timetabled the same amount of time to be taught it in.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I'd rather expect admissions officers to have some idea of the relative difficulty of applicants' subjects, based on published statistics for numbers of As, A*s, passes etc. in each subject. For Mandarin Chinese and any other language where substantial numbers of those taking the exams are native speakers, these statistics will of course be skewed (as mentioned in the article) - so maybe a better solution than making the existing exams easier would be to have a separate (more difficult) exam for native speakers, perhaps involving more literature study, so that the statistics for the non-native speakers would reflect the difficulty of the subject, and could be taken into account when applying to university.

We certainly discussed my GCSE choices in my Cambridge interview, so I don't think they were irrelevant in 1992 at least!

[emperor]

If it was harder than your A-levels, then I can see a case for saying it's too hard as a GCSE. I think (contrary to what fluffymormegil says) that GCSEs should all be of a roughly equivalent standard.

[aldabra]

I think I remember from O-level syllabus browsing that there were languages (Hindi is jumping out of my subconscious but I couldn't say why...) where there were two syllabuses, one for native speakers and one for learners-from-scratch.

This kind of thing happens in degree courses too; the standard you're meant to get to in a classics-from-scratch degree is way lower than the standard you get to in a classics-from-A-level degree, but still shows a reasonable amount of work for a three year course. Martin's Open University Greek was about what I did for O-level, but I think for him it counted as a level 3 degree course.

It would be better if getting to Grade N in a subject showed an objective level of competence rather than successful completion of N years of a course, but the system already doesn't work like that.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

(I know you posted this ages ago but couldn't resist commenting - had a quick peek at your journal after seeing you were an AL and friend of lots of people I know in Cambridge!).

The thing I find hardest about Chinese is that all the words are so similar that it's so hard to remember them compared with vocabulary in European languages. I'm good at languages I'd say and I went to lessons once a week for two years, attended an intensive one-week course at SOAS and spent two months travelling round China, but my Chinese is still much worse than my Italian which I've hardly studied at all. Whether GCSEs should all be of equal difficulty is a different matter though.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Hello! I think I've seen you commenting on lnr's journal before.

I agree, the phonotactic constraints on syllable structure in Chinese mean there aren't that many different possible syllables, so there's a lot of homophones and near-homophones, which can be a problem. But for me, the hardest bit was remembering the characters! I could speak Chinese reasonably fluently after my GCSE (though I'm enormously rusty now), but the characters began evaporating the moment the exam finished... Indo-European languages just get easier the more you learn, though.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I've been to quite a few of beckyc's parties as well if you've been to any of them.

I've got a reasonably good visual memory so I actually find the characters easier in some ways. I have to think of all the different tones as different colours to remember them! I've never learned to write the characters at all though. And it tooks me ages to find a decent book teaching the characters - I found a good one when I was in Shanghai in the end, but I'd looked quite hard before that.

I've been listening to ChinesePod recently even though I'm not really keeping up my Chinese actively at all as I'm not sure when I'm likely to go back there.

What modules do you AL for by the way? I've only started working there a few months ago, so am still getting used to the way everything works. Just registered for my first module as a student...

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I've been to quite a few of beckyc's parties as well if you've been to any of them.

I don't think I've managed to make any of those, no, but I have been to many parties containing beckyc.

I've never learned to write the characters at all though.

Ah, that was the main thing I was thinking of. It was certainly easier remembering them for recognition purposes than for active production. (Just as I always find it easier reading a language than speaking it.) But the GCSE was divided into the usual 4 sections of Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking (with a small extra bit on demonstrating you knew how to look characters up in a dictionary), so learning to write was necessary. Even the native Chinese speakers at my school found it hard - their letters home to HK were always peppered with English words or romanisations where they told me they'd forgotten the character and couldn't be bothered to look it up.

What modules do you AL for by the way?

U210 (The English Language: Past, Present and Future) and E303 (English Grammar in Context). Ideally I'd rather teach pure historical linguistics courses, but the OU don't offer those :-) I'm also a student on MST121 and MS221, with a view to getting yet another degree (in Physics, for a change).

What are you studying now?

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I didn't even think about starting to learn to write the characters (though there were one or two occasions when I couldn't manage to get my tones right that I managed to communicate by drawing simple characters in the air!)

I'm registered for M876 Relational Database Systems. Not the most glamorous course in the world but it's relevant to work and I get study leave for it :-) I want to do some of the psychology courses at some point. Having taught mathematics at several universities and different levels I'm quite curious as to what the maths courses are like.

I'm working in the Institute of Educational Technology doing web development, mostly on internal IET things and new features for Moodle, but I'm currently doing some testing on some stuff that you'll probably see for students to give feedback to their ALs.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Having taught mathematics at several universities and different levels I'm quite curious as to what the maths courses are like.

I'm only familiar with the "opening suite" of maths courses (MU120, MST121 and MS221), which originally formed a single first level 60-point course called something like "Introduction to Mathematics" (all the faculties used to have such a starting course; now just a couple still remain, like A103: Introduction to the Humanities). They're intended to give people a foundation for higher level maths and science courses, mainly. Like many OU courses, they make use of a range of media for teaching: alongside the text books and additional exercise books there are audio materials taking you through the steps of some key skills and video materials illustrating things like conics. The tutorials are generally quite poorly attended, but I find them enjoyable: mine have usually involved a mixture of doing further exercises and watching the tutor going through proofs on the board. The first level courses are assessed just by tutor- and computer-marked assignments; MS221 has a final exam, however (in addition to TMAs and CMAs).

My friend atreic has just started tutoring on one of the third level maths courses - Optimisation, I think. I imagine she'd be able to tell you how it compares with Cambridge maths, if you were interested.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

What I should really do is pop down to the library and look at all the course materials there. I taught essentially A-level maths to engineers at Surrey (algebraic manipulation, calculus, complex numbers, curve sketching), first year maths students at Royal Holloway and everything under the sun at Oxford.

The teaching at Surrey was definitely the most difficult for lots of reasons. I was also involved in a partial redesign the module, so spent quite a lot of time trying to work out how to make it better.

The one thing I found my students there really liked was the mathtutor videos (http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/mathtutor.php), but I was surprised how few good materials were already out - I had to do an awful lot from scratch myself.