(本文是為中文學校每月簡訓monthly newsletter所寫, 主要在檢討本校首度不教授注音符號的教學概況, 學生是幼稚園中班的學生, 年紀從四到六歲不等, 學生幾乎全是在家不說中文的華裔領養兒童, 或是非華裔學生.)

Our Pre-Kindergarten (B Track) class this year is not the first Pre-K class which consists of mostly non-Chinese speaking children. However, it is the first Pre-Kindergarten class in the history of our Chinese School which is not instructed with Chinese traditional phonetic symbol system, i.e. bo, po, mo, fo. 

Our school decided upon a new curriculum last year and implemented the Two-Track system this year.  The reason is that we have had more enrollment of non-Chinese speaking children than ever.  Most of these children are adoptive children from China originally.  This school year, there are several non-Chinese students.  Take the Pre-K class for example, we have one Korean student and one Indonesian student whose mother is .Chinese.  At the beginning of Spring Semester, we also had several visiting students who are non-Chinese. 

 The enrollment of non-Chinese speaking and/or non-Chinese students is expected to grow.  In order to accommodate such students and to adapt to the new changes in our school, the Two-Track system was chosen.

When I was asked to teach this class, I researched extensively for teaching materials and textbooks.  However, I had difficulty in finding suitable books for Pre-K level.  Since we had decided not to teach the phonetic symbol system, my job then became more challenging.  Our students were instructed to record homework on a CD on a weekly basis to help with their pronunciation.  I did not teach my students to recognize and/or write symbols, yet, they are taught to pronounce them.  It is based upon the belief that pronunciation is the foundation to learn any foreign language.

Consequently, most of the teaching materials were created by me.  All the handouts are created for youngsters to help them master the pronunciation of different symbols and the sounds of compound vowels.  The four tones are stressed on a regular basis.  Counting numbers has been instructed from day one.  To date, my students are able to count from one to eighty.  The ultimate goal is to count from one to one hundred by the end of this school year.

In order to enhance the conversational ability of non-Chinese speaking students, I asked the students to turn in questionnaires about themselves.  Afterwards, they were asked to record self-introductions, their hobbies, dislikes and their family members.  This method helped students to practice some basic Chinese conversation while they were still building up their pronunciation skills.

At this stage of learning, all the characters are pictographic.  By the end of semester, we will learn 19 characters including numbers from one to ten and some pictographic characters such as sun (日), moon (月), (wood) 木 , mud (土) etc.

Most of what my class has learned this year will be repeated in the future.  My greatest hope is for them to enjoy coming to Chinese class.  The more they want to come, the better they will learn.  As far as how much they learn, that depends on each child’s individual comprehension ability, self-motivation and persistence.  What our school has been doing is to accommodate the need of non-Chinese speaking families.  We can surely foresee such an accommodation will be ongoing.