大家好，

 

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far. It is great to get ideas of best practice from so many colleagues. Please do keep your responses coming, as I can collate all of them and present them to our school as possible alternatives to our current system.

 

Let me just remind everyone to please reply to me personally, rather than to the entire forum: [log in to unmask]

 

祝好，

 

马老师

 

 

老师们好！

 

I am hoping you can help by answering a couple of questions regarding how students choose (or are chosen) to study Mandarin in your schools. In our school, students take a test in French or Spanish at the end of term 1 in year 7, and those with the highest scores are offered the choice to study Mandarin. To me, this seems quite an inaccurate way to measure someone’s suitability for Mandarin study, and we often end up with students who score well on this setting test, but then find studying Mandarin very hard.

 

I am hoping to collect experiences from other schools, to show our school some alternatives to the current system and hopefully begin a reform. Therefore, if you can answer the following questions I would really appreciate it. Please reply to [log in to unmask]

 

1.       Do students at your school choose Mandarin freely, or is there some kind of selection procedure?

2.       When, and how, does this procedure take place?

3.       Do you think your school’s method for choosing Mandarin students is successful? Why?

4.       What changes would you recommend to the system?

 

祝大家圣诞快乐！

 

Adam Moorman 马安德

Language Teacher 语言教师