Chinese program launches in Middle School

After months of planning, the Chinese program has begun for sixth and seventh graders.

By ALIXANDRA BINNEY
Story editor
and JOSELYN LAI
Editor-in-chief

Four months into its pilot year, Poly’s new Chinese Language Program has successfully found its footing with Minhua Gu at its helm. The Global Initiatives Committee’s proposal last year to implement Mandarin into the sixth and seventh grade World Language curricula, along with the research conducted by the Chinese Language Initiative Committee (CLIC), culminated in the addition of Gu to Poly’s faculty this year. Her challenge: to develop for the long term a curriculum for Chinese language and culture. Beginning in early 2008, Head of School Debbie Reed, Assistant Head Greg Feldmeth, CLIC chair Carmie Rodriguez, Upper School Director Jamie Neilson and Lower School Director Mariana Robles began the search for a teacher to head the Chinese program in the pipeline. Believing that “the success or failure of a program [has] everything to do with the teacher,” the group reviewed a plethora of applications from across the country and abroad, looking for a native speaker who also had experience in both teaching and developing curricula.
In the midst of the sea of résumés, one application caught everyone’s eye. Minhua Gu was then on staff as the Chinese teacher at Spartanburg Day School in South Carolina. She had been teaching the K-4 grades for two years and was ready to try her hand at junior high students. Envisioning her own personalized curriculum, Gu moved to Southern California not only to teach Mandarin to Poly middle school students, but also to form a long-term Chinese program, which could perhaps encompass a future China or East Asia course in the freshman World Cultures curriculum.
Now that she has been at Poly for four months, Gu appears quite certain about her plans for her Middle School students. “This year we build the foundation for the new language program, in which we strive to build a fun and interesting program that allows students to explore as many aspects of the Chinese language as possible,” she explains. “Shortly, we will implement it in the Upper School.”
The multiple committees involved in the creation of the Chinese Language Program allowed Gu to create her own personalized curriculum, including classroom teaching methods and textbooks. Gu’s current emphasis is communication, including conversational skills and oral and written presentations. The sixth graders, all of whom must sample the language for about a month, learned to speak simple sentences and expressions. The seventh graders, who are committed to Chinese as their World Language, “learn the grammar in depth, such as sentence structure [and] forming questions and answers.” They now understand the Mandarin pronunciation system, read the phonetic pinyin system and form short compositions in Simplified Chinese characters. Gu has also enlisted the help of short stories to strengthen reading and writing skills. Students also develop their listening and pronunciation skills with audiotapes and films, and the seventh graders can comprehend short dialogues between native speakers. The goal is to “have students understand that the Chinese language is a fun language, used by many people around the world.”
Thus far, it appears that she has been successful in that aspect. “[Although Chinese] is hard because of the tones and the characters, Ms. Gu is really nice, and we play a lot of fun games,” says seventh grader Morayo Odujinrin. “My mom made me take the class, but now I’m glad I did.”
With a total of 80 students, including the entire sixth grade and one seventh grade class, Gu focuses on interactive learning to interest students and encourage class participation. She explains, “I rely on a variety of methods to instruct, such as role play, total physical response, pen pal projects, field trips, visual presentations and games.”
“Total physical response,” a teaching method developed by Dr. James Asher, is based on the premise that the brain has a biological program for acquiring any language on earth. Through role-play, physical classroom games and pen pals, the brain internalizes the language much faster than with simple memorization. It is a process meant to mimic the learning of a child’s first language. The class has just completed their first pen pal entries, discussing each student’s holiday plans. They hope to send them to a charter school in Los Angeles. Some of their other coursework is on display in the North Campus library.
Gu has designed the class on thematic units; each unit contains both language and cultural aspects, as Gu believes that “a person can never learn the language without understanding the culture.” The class visited the Pacific Asia Museum, where they learned about Chinese history, art and literature; the Hilton Plaza in San Gabriel, which has various Chinese-owned businesses and the P.F. Chang’s restaurant, in which they could only communicate in Chinese. Additionally, Gu’s students recently visited the kindergarten class, presenting their designs of traditional war and Beijing opera costumes and teaching the children how to say colors in Mandarin.
“I am thrilled to see so much progress after only four months,” says Gu, who finds her middle school-age students “inquisitive” and more independent than her younger students at Spartanburg Day School. “The students are capable of doing so many different things with this language…I cannot wait for the future!”