LLED 7504 on Sep. 14th

In today's class, we talked about how to build comprehensive input while teaching a new language for our students. One thing we repeatedly emphasized during the class was involving English or students' first language and establishing meaning for students. After learning Latin through past 2 classes, I could tell how significant of understanding the contents. I have taught mandarin for 1 year and half, the school required me only speaking mandarin in the class, which was really hard for me to let my students understand everything I taught. Every time I saw their confused faces, I felt I needed to explain to them in English. However, when I was doing that, I always thought if I was doing right things. Learning TPRs helps me eliminate these confusing.

Speaking of teaching mandarin, I feel one of the biggest challenges for me is to teach my students how to write. Usually I do not want them to read or write Chinese at the very beginning, because that is overwhelming for them. Even for native speakers like me, we learned how to write Chinese characters from kindergarten all the way to high schools. Nowadays, since I did not write Chinese very often, I have to always check how to write them. So I am wondering if we start from teaching pinyin instead of Chinese characters, when should we involve Chinese characters into the curriculum and when should we let them learn how to write? Furthermore, I feel this also depends on what purposes for our students to learn mandarin. If they only want to be able to talk in mandarin, I think we do not have to take writing part very seriously.