A Challenge I Have Encountered

In fall 2009, I started to teach Chinese language at a community college in New York City. It was the first time I taught in a formal educational institute in America. I quickly encountered some challenges: Students were not interested in my lectures, students lost attention quickly, and some students did not make enough progress, and class time management (the class always ran much faster than I expected, I could teach at most half of the materials I prepared).

At that time, I was doing a Spanish classroom teaching observation at Brooklyn College Academy. So I went to ask the Spanish teacher Mr. Malval for help. Mr. Malval was an experienced teacher. I told him about my frustrations; for example, my students refused to participate in a self introduction presentation. Mr. Malval told me that Chinese language is entirely different from all other western languages. A Chinese language class has to be very simple at the beginning. It has to be very visual, and slow paced. He said the presentation might be too difficult for my students at that time.

Thanks to Mr. Malval’s suggestions, I started to put my class materials into PowerPoint presentations—I visualized all the vocabulary in vivid and funny pictures, and use it to replace my old dry lectures. It worked out wonderfully. Students are visual, and a vivid image impresses a person more than flat sentences.

When it came to time management, Mr. Malval told me to teach less, and I reduced the content, and made it clear and simple. I constantly asked my students if they understood and if they had any questions. I also did surveys among my students to improve my teaching.

As for how to interest and motivate students, I learned a few major techniques from Mr. Malval: Conduct lecture in an inquiry way, associate the class content with the students’ daily life, encourage students’ participation enthusiastically and genuinely, and walk into students while doing oral speaking practice to get their attention.

In Mr. Malval’s class, he started his class with five to six “Do now” sentences, all in questioning form. The students were always enthusiastic about participating. Because the questions were always associated with their daily life, the students were always taking an interest in answering questions such as “What did you eat at breakfast today?” (when learning food and eating).

It is a way that came as a suspense to arouse the students’ curiosity instead of just telling the meanings flatly. In this process of finding the answers to the suspense, the students had to think actively and be engaged. I have been using these techniques into my Chinese teaching classes: They worked well.

At the end, I received a very good teaching evaluation from the department for the fall semester, and had stepped out my first firm step as a New York teacher.