Judging Textbooks by Their Covers

One of the nice things about home-schooling is the flexibility of choosing textbooks on our own, or going without a set textbook at all.

In more recent years, It has become fashionable to learn the Chinese language in the US. Therefore, a wide variety of textbooks targeting the North America market have become available. These could range from the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban) to a free wikibook.

However, it is rather difficult to evaluate these books. Most of the online sellers do not provide adequate samples of their books. When they do provide the text itself, they are shown without the context of any teaching methodology. In a way, we are forced to judge the books by their covers.

Most of these textbooks are compiled and produced from inside China. Although they all claim to aim at the North American audience, their content still has very little, if any at all, relevance of children's life here. This is understandable since their authors, while language experts in China, generally lack life experience here.

The textbook currently being used in my daughter's Chinese school is just such an example. It is one of the earliest and arguably the most widely used in America, published by China's Jinan University in 1997. My daughter found the book uninteresting, which I totally agree. When I look through her second-grade textbook, I found:

• The main text tends to be very simple and naive, even for a second grade book (which is most likely used by a third-grader here), and therefore "uninteresting". There are no stories.
  
• In many occasions the text is awkward, far from the way how a normal kid would talk. Even the dialogs feel like "forced". (This is actually a common problem in Chinese writings, from literature to popular movie/TV dialogs.)
• Pretty much all text characters have their Pinyin printed directly on top of them. This may be helpful for students to learn how to pronounce the characters in the beginning, but it is actually detrimental for them to learn the characters. When they read the text, they tend to read the Pinyin, not the characters.

There is actually another Chinese school in our neighborhood which was established more recently from a split from the older Denver Chinese school. They use a newer textbook called Standard Chinese (标准中文). From this link we can see all the teaching text in this book, but nothing else. The text looks only marginally better than the book we have.

Among the available textbooks, one that is created here in the US stands out as the most interesting. It's author, Dr. Ma Liping, had taught elementary school in China in the past but has then lived and studied in the US, including earning a Ph.D. in curriculum design from Stanford. She had founded the Stanford Chinese School in 1994 and used her own experimental textbook there ever since. Her methodology emphasizes reading and learning Chinese characters through reading. She would postpone learning Pinyin to a later stage so the students are not distracted from learning the characters at the beginning.

The table of content for her second grade textbook seems to show that they have a lot of stories to read, although it's hard to tell if they have anything more closely related to children's lives here at all. There is only one sample available, a variation of the famed fox and crow story. It is certainly an interesting story. The reading material associated with this lesson are not too bad either.

What's most impressive, however, is the way this textbook isolates and illustrates what it calls "grammar point" after the lesson. One of the most difficult and confusing things about Chinese is that the same character can have entirely different meanings at different context and this sample "grammar point" does a pretty good job in showing and teaching them. (It even uses a little English at that!)

The Stanford Chinese School web site also has some articles indicating the textbook is gaining popularity in other Chinese schools. They also point out that many schools have suffered from various difficulties in the attempts to adopt them.

I also have my own doubts. While emphasizing reading, this textbook seems to assume that the students already possess sufficient oral communication skills in Chinese, perhaps from their family environment. That would not be true for my daughter, who so far speaks English exclusively at home. It is also not clear how they teach pronunciation without using Pinyin. (My daughter has already learned Pinyin, or its concept, so this may be a moot point for us.)

But it does seem to be worthwhile to invest $65 for a closer look at one-year's worth of textbook. So off goes a check. We should know more soon enough.