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Dear All,

Thanks again for your responses. I enjoy reading your thoughts on these matters, but again they diverge off into so many threads that it's difficult to keep track of discussions on a group email. There must be a Google+ group or something similar which would help us all keep track of who says what without scrolling back through our inboxes.

@JohnBald - It must have been great to count Michel Thomas as a friend, I to find him a very inspirational character and I have quite a few of his quotes printed out on my classroom walls. I accept that I mis-characterised his approach saying with regards to oracy, as in all his original four courses he does deal with spelling systems and differences early on. I was conflating it with the Harold Browne course, in which he gets very explicit about it not dealing with reading and writing.
I read the Learning Revolution with interest, a former HoD passed me his copy - his school was using the Es Posible / C'est Possible courses to great effect.

@Tim Nash I'm not sure how one might adapt the MT method to teach Chinese to high school students and incorporate Hanzi and PinYin, but I'd be very interested to see what such an approach looked like. My guess is that it would be supplemented by a gradually increasing usage of Skritter to develop character recognition and writing. What I do like about the MT approach, with European languages, is that it is very specific about the content taught and the order, so that students understand the most useful structures and languages first.

Minute Mandarin looks slick, I'll take a good look at it this CNY break and get back to you. My initial thought is that it looks like another great tool for individual learner (forgot to mention the Amanda reading app in my list of great tools for learners) - do you see it as a tool that could be used to teach classes of students and if so, how would that work? Or, is it that you think that as teachers we need to move to a more de-centralised model of instruction?

Regarding AIM, what I found when I attended a couple of their courses was that their approach systemetises a lot of things which I had been using instinctively, but with less rigour and  forethought - it really helped me to crystalise my approach to 100% Target Language use in the classroom and gave me a better framework for using gestures. It is also great fun for the students. With French and Spanish, writing is introduced pretty quickly, but then this is less of an issue with European languages.

@JSmith - As an adult, I learnt Pinyin first and then characters. For me, Simon's point is very true about "The drawback to this is that you'll need to 'fit in' introducing characters to basic words they've learned previously, which may become tiresome."

I take your point, but with younger-middle school learners there are quite a few apps besides which those I've mentioned which help render the process a lot more enjoyable. I can see how for older students, this might be a bit more of a grind, though. There's a wider question here which I'm sure you've all pondered a lot more than I, which is how essential is it to learn to handwrite characters given that, outside of an exam setting, the vast L2 mandarin users would never need to write any text of much length by hand - even the HanBan are going to allow me to take typed versions of my written exam this year - given the shortage of time available to us as teachers, it makes sense that we could get more done if we didn't have to put students through hours of character writing practice (even though there are fun ways to speed this process up).

@Charlotte Cotton - Well done for being able to maintain enthusiasm and progress on such a scanty time allowance. Typically how many characters are you aiming to teach your students in a year? Don't they get frustrated at the lag between what they can say and what they can read and/or write? How do you mediate against this?

Thanks again for all of your responses.

p.s.

I feel I should add that I joined this ListServe when I was teaching at Harrow, HK. I no longer work at that school, hence the change in email address from my original post.