A unique effort in the CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is the strong push on developing student's reading comprehension in Chinese, although high quality education on other skills are also provided in high standard, e.g. verbal communication and writing. Reading comprehension is known as one of the most challenging bottlenecks in Chinese education as a second language. The best practices to be incorporated in our program are based on 1) modern second language education theories; 2) maximum language input; and 3) student centric curriculum, instruction and assessment. CHINESE LEARNING SERIES adopts a "maximum acquisition" methodology, which is designed based on Stephen Krashen's "Input Hypothesis," pedagogy and educational psychology. Basically, CHINESE LEARNING SERIES students acquire Chinese in a natural order by receiving comprehensible and constructional verse input from classical poems. Multimedia tools are incorporated in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES, e.g. pictures, animation, software and character cards that help students memorize and reflect the Chinese characters that they learnt. Students maximize their language input utilizing poems, animation, games and other effective and interactive means in classroom and at home. Students learn while "playing." CHINESE LEARNING SERIES teaching and practice materials are easy to follow and fun to use. It has been proven highly effective to have young children reading and reciting famous poems during the past two years. It helps to develop and establish student's Chinese language sense. "Recitation" not only overcomes the learner's anxiety of "foreign language," but also turns tacit knowledge into explicit language. The repetition rate in CHINESE LEARNING SERIES is determined based on the laws of forgetting rate in human, e.g. the contents need to be repeated 6 times at different time points to ensure the students memorizing what they learned. Exercises and reviews after school are weighed equally important as what they learned in class. The CHINESE LEARNING SERIES development team has put in substantial efforts in designing student homework exercise materials interactive exercises, the word cards and reading exercises on paper. In general, all contents will be reviewed 6 times in different ways in six months so that the students can achieve a permanent memory. We also ask students to listen stories we provide to them at least twice a week. Listening is an important component in building language senses. During the entire six-year CHINESE LEARNING SERIES instruction, the development of reading comprehension progresses following the order of "listening to read," "semi-independent reading" and "independent reading." More detail series and course information, go to http: //gwcs-md.org
About the Author: Mr. Peng Wang holds degrees in Engineering, Computer Science and MBA. He served in a Maryland Chinese School as an Assistant Principal and later Principal. He was an author of numerous articles on Overseas Chinese Language education. He initiated the development of this CHINESE LEARNING SERIES curriculum and teaching materials in collaboration with other teachers and renowned Chinese language education scholars in China, Canada and US. A new assessment method was also created by Mr. Wang and developed with others to quantify the number of Chinese characters that students learnt. He was a founder and Principal of the Great Wall Chinese School, Maryland, USA (GWCS).