According to Unesco research, 25 of China’s spoken languages and dialects are ‘critically endangered’, and around the world thousands have already have been lost over the past century.
Connecting My Children to Their Heritage in Mandarin
Although my parents’ English is serviceable, it is only in Mandarin that they’re at ease, that they can inhabit their own skins.
Credit.Lucy Jones
Feb. 12, 2021
On Sunday afternoons, my grandfather would sit by my elbow while I gripped his prized calligraphy brush, tracing inky lines on tissue-thin paper. “Many Chinese consider calligraphy a high form of art,” my grandfather reminded me whenever my attention flagged or arm drooped.
I’d sigh in response this weekly ritual just felt like more school.
Growing up as a child of first-generation Chinese immigrants, I was used to straddling two worlds that of my parents and the country they emigrated from, and America, where the pressure to assimilate buffeted us constantly. The message was clear in the media and popular culture of the 1980s: It was better to speak English, exclusively and without an accent; to replace thermoses of dumplings with hamburgers. My father�
TEQ Instructional Videos for Chinese Language Teachers
Chinese language teacher Christina Xu, who teaches at the Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Illinois, demonstrates how to use a variety of strategies to introduce new language items while talking with the students.
For guidance on how to use these materials, please see
Classroom Video
In this Chinese class, Christina Xu’s 9th graders from the Walter Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois, are learning the unit Inviting Friends to a Birthday Party . In this specific lesson, they are talking about how to make an invitation for a birthday party and how to respond to it. In this video, you will watch some selected video clips taken from a lesson period, which demonstrates how the teacher used a variety of strategies to introduce new language items while talking with the students. The video has also shown how the teacher reinforced learning for the new language items through different activities