What are the requirements to be a Mandarin tutor?It is difficult to find a Primary 2 mandarin tuition, but it is not easy.
The reason why I say this is because this major is easy to learn but difficult to master. Just think about it, even if you can speak Cantonese yourself, do you have the confidence to teach this language to others? Next, let’s take a look at what it takes to be a competent Mandarin tutor.
- Language proficiency
Mandarin contains a variety of dialects, mainly from the southwestern and northern regions of China.
Nearly a billion people speak it as their first or second language. Unless you are lucky enough to speak Mandarin fluently, your first step in becoming a Mandarin tutor is to learn the language.
You can do this with language courses or with your own personal tutor, but many experts recommend that teachers learn the foreign language in their country of origin.
You also have to develop your teacher skills. There are many courses and programs you can take online and in person to earn a teaching degree or certificate, many of which are geared toward teaching foreign languages.
Whether you plan to teach students one-on-one or tutor an entire class, it’s important to understand the basics in teaching.
- Teaching experience
Teaching experience is very helpful, but not required. Beyond practical skills, if you want to be a Mandarin tutor, you need to find a way to source and screen prospective students.
As a Mandarin tutor, you develop lessons, which include designing step-by-step lesson plans to fit your specific class schedule. You must develop testing and assessment procedures to ensure that your students actually learn the material.
- Designate teaching objects
The curriculum that is developed depends largely on your students. For example, if you wish to be a Mandarin tutor with only one-on-one adult students, the lesson plan you develop may be very different from the lesson plan you develop for a large class of mixed-age students.
Therefore, before embarking on your quest to become a Mandarin tutor, it is important to consider what type of students you intend to teach.
While most teaching and language skills can be learned, there is no substitute for experience.
Before you tutor yourself, you might consider serving as a student teacher for a while. Consider advertising at local colleges and universities, and place an ad in your local newspaper.
Social networking sites are also invaluable in finding potential students. Be a member of different forums or other sites that may attract people with a particular interest in the Primary 2 mandarin tuition and ensure that other members are aware of your tutor wishes.
“Your Mandarin level is really poor, how could it be so poor?”
Xu Li (pseudonym) couldn’t help teasing her classmates when they couldn’t describe a simple idiom.
Xu Li, who was born in Hong Kong, taught Mandarin in Hong Kong for 4 years. Xu Li started teaching initials and finals, and guided students to upgrade step by step to fight monsters and overcome language barriers.
“Not all students like to learn Mandarin, but they especially like my Mandarin class.”
Since Hong Kong’s return to the motherland, Putonghua has become one of the core courses in primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, and the SAR government has also begun to train Putonghua teachers.
In 2009, Hong Kong’s senior high school reformed its academic system, and the Putonghua curriculum covers Primary One to Secondary Three (equivalent to the Mainland’s third grade—reporter’s note).
Public institutions are the main force in teaching Mandarin courses.
In 2014, after graduating with a master’s degree in Chinese Education, Xu Li joined the Chinese Department of a college affiliated to her alma mater as a teacher. She mainly teaches three courses: Practical Mandarin, Mandarin Communication and Communication, and Chinese Reading and Writing.
Most of the students enter colleges and universities to study courses because of their unsatisfactory grades in the middle school graduation examination.
The pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of Mandarin are different from Cantonese.
Whether in class or between classes, Hong Kong students whose native language is Cantonese always communicate with Xu Li in Cantonese.
When answering questions, when encountering situations that cannot be expressed in Mandarin, students always throw out a sentence in Cantonese and ask Xu Li to translate it.
“Please speak Mandarin with me.” Xu Li asked the students to communicate in Mandarin throughout the Mandarin course.
Slowly, Xu Li worked out a set of advanced course content. In the first class, Xu Li evaluated the students’ Mandarin foundation based on the students’ self-introduction. If the average level of the students in the class is not good, she will start from the simplest initials and finals, and then guide the students to translate between Cantonese and Mandarin and practice in context.
If most of the students have a certain foundation in Mandarin, she will teach them step by step in the order of vocabulary, sentences, and context.
In her class, there are generally about 30 students, and each class is 3 hours. According to the allocation ratio of Sanqi, Xu Li always guides students to give seven points and herself three points in course design.
“Students need to speak a lot to practice using the language.”
She found that sometimes students did not speak very well, but instead stimulated the attention and enthusiasm of other students. “Among the laughter, I realized that half of the ten classmates would not make the same mistake.”
But some mistakes are difficult to correct for a while. The student nodded after being corrected, and continued to make the same mistake next time.
For example, when Hong Kong students express “you eat first” and “you go first”, they always say “you eat first” and “you go first”. This is because in Cantonese grammar, adverbs often come after verbs, that is, “you eat first” and “you walk first”.
Another habit that cannot be broken is that students like to add the word “then” at the beginning of every sentence. Xu Li explained that it is easier for students to learn Taiwanese Mandarin because Cantonese and Taipu have no tongue-twisting sounds. Influenced by Taiwanese culture, Hong Kong students like to start a sentence with “then”.
“Many students work very hard, and their notes are filled with pinyin.” Xu Li observed that after the oral English practice in class, some students would practice oral English by themselves after returning home.
Two weeks before the Primary 2 mandarin tuition final exam, she will announce the exam questions of 6 scenarios in advance, and the students will prepare them by themselves. During the exam, the students selected one of the topics and expressed it one-on-one in front of her.
“I will design some spoken language scenarios, for example, if you are the sales manager of a restaurant, what should you do when a customer is dissatisfied.”
Some diligent people thought out the answers to the six scenes in advance, wrote them down on paper, and began to recite them.
Xu Li always guides them not to use this method as much as possible: “What is written on the paper is written language, and I hope what they speak is spoken language.”
In her spare time, Xu Li once asked her students: “What are your hobbies?”
One of the answers is “look at the original novels on Qidian Chinese.com”.
Xu Li herself reads it every day, and reads a chapter or two when she suffers from insomnia. “This is a cultural exchange and a student’s hobby, but it works.”
In class, Xu Li does not deliberately teach simplified characters, and students rarely read mainland newspapers, but students can basically understand the original novels of Qidian Chinese website.
Some new Internet vocabulary, such as “very good” and “moving bricks”, Hong Kong students may not be able to react for a while, but in the context, it is easy to understand.
“There is no problem in reading, but I just don’t understand pinyin to text.” Chen Ke (pseudonym), born in 1997, is a student of Xu Li’s class of 2015.
When he was studying in Hong Kong, he went to Tsinghua University for exchange and also worked as an intern at CCTV.
As early as in elementary and middle school, Chen Ke had already learned Mandarin.
Putonghua has been a core subject in Hong Kong primary schools since 1998. Students enrolled in 1998 and later will learn Mandarin from the first grade of primary school to the third grade of junior high school.
In 2000, Putonghua became a subject of the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination. Primary 2 mandarin tuition become more and more useful.
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