Native or non-native teachers?

[Silent]

 

 

My point is that faced with both choices, and little other info I would go with the native as its simply a balance of probabilities . More information could possible change my mind.

Quite a different point of view from the original:

 

 

I wouldn't pay for a non-ethnic mainland Chinese language teacher. I wouldn't really want a Taiwanese or HK born teacher either. 

 

 

 

 

2) I qualified my statement with "often". They are often worse than useless. Sure, they're sometimes better than useless, too. The problem is that people rely on them too much.

I think stereotypes are generally very useful, one of the reasons that generalizations are so common and persistent. It's just that often times people don't recognize it as stereotyping. In many contexts stereotyping is not considered controversal. I mean a guy with jeans, a Slayer T-shirt and long hair is likely to be stereotyped as a metal fan. I think few people will have an issue with that while this is not necessarily true. The trouble is mainly caused by stereotypes where politics and mass media focus on one feature. Then Group X has 0.1% higher incidence of criminal behaviour becomes easily Group X are criminals with a lot of other nasty effects.

 

 

 

It's like when people claim that atheists actually do believe in God, but they don't admit it because they don't want to.

I'm an atheist, I do believe in Atheus, the god of Atheists. ;) 

[Silent]

 

 

Talk about scandals: a while ago a Dutch tv personality said some seriously racist things about Chinese people. I was shocked when I saw it. 

I'm one of the people not understanding the outrage. To me that tv personality just made a bad timed silly joke that primarily showed how a complete ignorant idiot he is.

[Demonic_Duck]

I think stereotypes are generally very useful, one of the reasons that generalizations are so common and persistent. It's just that often times people don't recognize it as stereotyping. In many contexts stereotyping is not considered controversal. I mean a guy with jeans, a Slayer T-shirt and long hair is likely to be stereotyped as a metal fan. I think few people will have an issue with that while this is not necessarily true. The trouble is mainly caused by stereotypes where politics and mass media focus on one feature. Then Group X has 0.1% higher incidence of criminal behaviour becomes easily Group X are criminals with a lot of other nasty effects.

I don't think assuming some guy is a metal fan because they're wearing the clothes metal fans typically wear is a stereotype. There's no judgement there. On the other hand, assuming that metal fans are violent, had troubled childhoods and take drugs would be a stereotype.

 

In many areas of the world, there are racial trends which are considerably more significant than your 0.1% example, whether they pertain to criminality, income, school grades, lifestyle choices etc. Admitting that those trends exist isn't problematic, in fact ignoring them and the causes behind them can be dangerous. Overgeneralising and using them to predict behaviour of individuals despite what you know (or don't know) about those inviduals is what's problematic.

 

This topic has already got pretty far away from native vs. non-native speakers... time for yet another split? Or has this particular branch already run its course?

[Angelina]

that god isn't necessarily an old white man etc?

 

What's wrong with old white men? Old white men deserve as much respect as anyone else. I do oppose colonialism, neo-colonialism and so on, yet, putting all the blame on people who happen to be pale and male seems wrong.

 

I respect Johnny and don't want to blame him for anything. As a non-native English, non-native Chinese speaker, not exactly white person I am trying to understand why would anyone choose other people over me when it comes to employment. 

[realmayo]

I may have missed this among the posts on political correctness and sex with old white men but: when it comes to choosing between a native and non-native teacher I'd ask: 

 

- what's the difference in their language ability?

- what you need the teacher for?

 

I would say the best non-native teacher would be one who "sounds Chinese" when talking, he can chatter away easily in accurate, idiomatic Chinese. But he almost certainly has a smaller vocabulary and he lacks lots of "cultural" references (children's TV shows, food, geography, celebrities, history, blah blah).

 

So at beginner levels, a non-native is fine for every aspect of your learning. It's only once your level gets much higher that native and non-native would seem to make a difference.

 

 

Except for two things. First, how many non-native Chinese teachers are that good anyway? I'd guess most aren't, and so the level at which the non-native starts letting you down in certain areas probably comes a bit earlier: they are still good at explaining but do you really want to model any aspect of your Chinese on theirs? Are you as a student confident you can trust that you would't be picking up unnatural speech? Furthermore, you might not be corrected when you produce your own unnatural speech ("I know exactly what you mean but we normally say it like this...".)

 

Second, people from China think and behave differently from English people, English people think and behave differently from Russians, and so on. This might be seen in modesty after receiving praise, or levels of deference expressed to older people, or in body language, and so on. 

 

Most non-native teachers won't be providing you exposure to that -- they won't be providing you with exposure to how Chinese people talk to one another. And at some point, that becomes important.

 

 

But then again, by that point you're probably getting that exposure from all kinds of native sources, and talking to enough Chinese people that you'll be told when you say things that "sound wrong".

[Demonic_Duck]

^ Very good point. Also, not everyone wants the same from a teacher; for example, some people only want conversation practice (native speaker clearly better, their actual teaching ability doesn't matter as much); someone to make their speaking/writing more idiomatic, natural-sounding and interesting (native speaker clearly better); improving their pronunciation (native speaker often better, though this depends largely on whether the speaker has the type of accent you wish to imitate); or simply helping to organise your study time, give you study tips and point you in the right direction (non-native speaker almost certainly better).

 

For what it's worth though, I reckon I'd be a better pronunciation teacher than most of the Chinese teachers I've had (all of whom are native speakers), even though many of them are excellent teachers in general. Mainly because I'd be brutally honest about it and not let you get away with "just barely understandable".

 

As such, I actually think this:

Furthermore, you might not be corrected when you produce your own unnatural speech ("I know exactly what you mean but we normally say it like this...".)

...can apply just as much to native speakers as non-natives. I think the main issue here is to know where to draw the line; how much does reiterating this point hold up my lesson? To what extent is this problem common to all students in the class, or is it only a single student that suffers from it? (In which case, the ideal approach is to talk to that student individually when a chance arises.)

Edit: quote from realmayo, not gato. My bad!

[Silent]

 

I don't think assuming some guy is a metal fan because they're wearing the clothes metal fans typically wear is a stereotype. There's no judgement there.

I don't see why it would not be a stereotype. You make an assessment based about the person without knowing anything about the person and many people make the same assessment while it may very well be an incorrect assessment. I think that's a stereotype and no different from Group X are criminals. Sure as I said many people will not recognize it as stereotyping because we're talking about self chosen properties and an assessment that is not considered negative. As the assessment is largely correct and neutral or positive few people will take offense.

 

To my knowledge judgement is not part of the definition of a stereotype, however if the stereotype is accompanied by a generally negative judgement  the problems start. Specially if the stereotype is based on a very small subgroup.

[LiMo]

@ Angelina

 

Hehe  , I think you were calling me out on my use of the term average. I'm understand the often meaningless or even extremely misguiding uses of the term "average," I'm definitely no statistician though and meant no harm so I hope that rivers not for me!  

[Angelina]

 There are better ways to spend our time than to discuss who makes a better teacher on average.

 

I like the discussion above on correcting unnatural speech. 

[realmayo]

@Demonic_Duck

Demonic_Duck said:

Furthermore, you might not be corrected when you produce your own unnatural speech ("I know exactly what you mean but we normally say it like this...".)

...can apply just as much to native speakers as non-natives

 

I'm flattered by the mix-up! I'd like to thank my family, my friends, my agent, ...

 

That aside, I think you're right, and I think the wider point applies more to one-on-one or very close teaching rather than in a typical classroom setting.

[Johnny20270]

 As a non-native English, non-native Chinese speaker, not exactly white person I am trying to understand why would anyone choose other people over me when it comes to employment. 

 

 

actually I wasn't going to add anything further, but that is a good question!. From a UK perspective, I have been on several employment boards and the sad fact of life there is prejudice everywhere. People have been turned down because of their skin color, race, sex religion etc It happens almost unknowingly. Its not like we all sit there and say, no f#ck that, he is an Arab or a muslim, must be a terrorist etc. That is just a retarded (yet common) view! Its more due to the fact that many professional companies understand that the ability of someone to work effectively in a team is vital for success of that team. A lot comes down to, do you like him/her? Can you build a rapor with this person etc race / religion / culture / your dress*** can be vital component role. 

 

Of course where does this line start and stop, I don't know really. If its based of your sex, the color of your skin, your facial features, your dress, your accent, then I take the view its completely biggoted. If its based on the fact that you have a very different culture, it can be ineffective.

 

*** sounds odd right? but  look at the heated debate in Europe about the burka. The line start becoming blurry now ...

 

 

 

 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Oops, sorry realmayo and gato! Maybe it's because your usernames both contain the sequence "_a_o". Who knows.

 

Teachers who don't correct obvious and repeated mistakes in a one-to-one teaching setting really have no excuse. Though I've never had a one-on-one teacher for Chinese for any extended period of time, so I don't know how commonplace this is (though I've heard it's all too common in Chinese language teaching).

[hedwards]

@Demonic_Duck, that's a rookie mistake that a lot of people make. The obviousness and frequency of an error has little to do with whether or not it should be corrected. A person's working memory has at most 7 bits of information that it can hold any any time. For a beginner at least 5 of those spots are likely to be already spoken for. Which means that realistically you can't expect to issue more than one correction at a time without serious negative consequences.

 

Which is why it's imperative to prioritize as it's often asking quite a bit just to get a student to make and retain that one correction while trying to also communicate. Just today I had a student making the wrong sound for this, pronouncing it more like zis, and he knew almost all the words on the page, but remembering to fix the pronunciation was a bit much. I know when I'm trying to read pinyin, that it can be quite a bit to keep track of due to the way that it's written with the tiny tone markers that are hard to see in time to get the correct tone sandhi.

 

In the long term, things only get fixed if the person learning focuses on an individual correction long enough for the responsibility to move from the prefrontal cortex over to the basal ganglia. Ideally at that point you'd move on to something else, but in practice that's overly conservative.

 

If you fail to do that, then you wind up with a lot of inefficiency and a student that hates your guts in most cases. At best you get a student that makes little or no progress as they're trying to fix more than their brain can deal with all at once.

[realmayo]

A person's working memory has at most 7 bits of information that it can hold any any time

 

Even if that's true, it doesn't mean you can't learn 8 things in a day, it just means you shouldn't try to learn them simultaneously.

Plus you should bear in mind that if a student repeatedly makes the same mistake then that mistake will itself move from the prefrontal cortex over to the basal ganglia and will take an awful lot of effort to remove it.

 

I read, I think on these forums, that where there's a risk of overloading a student with corrections, it's still valuable to repeat back to the student what he said, but corrected, i.e. "zis is my pet hamster", "ah, so this is your pet hamster"

[Angelina]

Can you build a rapport with this person

 

It all comes down to this. 

[Demonic_Duck]

@Demonic_Duck, that's a rookie mistake that a lot of people make. The obviousness and frequency of an error has little to do with whether or not it should be corrected.

 

If the student makes 50 mistakes within a single utterance, obviously the teacher can't correct them all at once, and I never claimed that s/he could or should (I recommend re-reading my post). How should s/he prioritise? By selecting those mistakes which are obvious and commonly occuring (and, I probably should have added, that hinder communication).

 

If not those criteria, which others would you suggest? The colour of the walls? What the teacher had for lunch earlier in the day? The phase of the moon?

[hedwards]

@RealMayo, learning 8 new things isn't usually an issue because you don't have to have those things in your mind at the same time. You'll be moving each one from working memory to short term memory to long term memory individually in most cases. Or you'll be consolidating them into a single chunk that can be handled more efficiently.

 

But in terms of language, you don't want to have to be constantly referring back to something you've learned, so it's going to take a lot longer to properly learn. Effectively you have to create a new habit around it. For practical reasons, you can't generally wait until it's completely resolved into a habit, but they shouldn't have to work on more than one correction at a time. It's just like learning to play chess. You can start with openings and swamp yourself, or you can start with a couple of pieces and learn how they work together to finish out the game before adding new ones.

 

@Demonic_Duck, the problem is that all errors are not equal, if a student is making a large number of mistakes, chances are that most of them are local errors rather than global errors and have limited impact on communication. Global errors, the ones that do prevent communication, are the ones that are always addressed first, with the local errors being addressed as time and memory permits.

 

But, you just have to address the errors as they correct them, if they learn to fix one thing, then you add a new thing to work on, people do eventually run out of things that need to be learned. But, if you give them a dozen things that need to be fixed just because you're trying to justify being employed, you ought to be fired for incompetence. Students don't learn effectively like that and part of the job of the teacher is to triage and prioritize which errors the student needs to fix now and which ones can be left for the future.

 

In most cases, it's pretty obvious what errors are causing failures in communication and which ones are just signals that the student isn't a native speaker.

 

This is all well established fact, the easiest way to fail to learn a language is insist upon perfection. The moment I gave up on trying to be perfect all the time was the moment I started to actually succeed in my efforts. It doesn't mean that I'm not striving for perfection, it just means that I'm wise enough to realize that progress is all that I, or anybody else, can do.

[Demonic_Duck]

I'm still not sure who you're arguing with, you've misinterpreted what I said (despite my clarification in my previous post) and are now tearing down the strawman you set up, even though I never suggested anything contrary to what you've just said. What I said is that there's no excuse for teachers to ignore glaring and repeated mistakes, not that teachers should try to correct every single mistake in one fell swoop.

[roddy]

Hedwards, could you please limit yourself to commenting on what people have said, rather than what you want them to have said so you can correct them. It isn't the first time and it's a waste of people's energy to point it out. If that's difficult, just post less. 

[hedwards]

@Roddy, I'm probably not going to come back if you're going to not just permit the bullying but take an active part in it. I'm not going to contribute here if I'm going to be treated this poorly.

 

Also, it's incredibly hypocritical of you to blame me both for misreading and for being misread. In this case, I'm doing neither and you're blaming me for causing problems.  Ultimately, it's your loss, I don't need to share what I've learned here there are plenty of other places where I could do that.

 

I addressed the point that Demonic made and he's now reiterating the same point that I addressed. Clearly, it's a waste of my time to address points that I've already addressed, if there's something to his post that I've not understood it's not in his post. That's hardly my fault.