Inquiry-based Learning in World Language Teaching

Inquiry-based Learning in World Language Teaching will definitely have its place, simply because there is no other knowledge or skill like language acquisition presenting the importance of involvement which is the essence of inquiry-based learning.

Last time when I talked with several moms, one mom said her little one spoke ‘Mine! Mine!” very early, because he often needs to argue for toys with his brothers. It gained other moms’ agreement. Involvement in language acquisition implies communication that leads to language understanding and inspires children to speak out. Usually when parents communicate with their child more, the child’s language have better development. On the other hand, there are cases reported that some parents baby-sit their kids with a TV or computer games which caused delay of the kids’ language development. Because watching TV is a one-sided language input, it lacks of language output.

The outcome of second language learning depends on how much a student could involve the language just like the first language acquisition. I’m glad to see the first three content standards in the Standards Selection of World Language are all about communication. In one word, involvement in second language teaching means helping students to use the language in real life and to speak out what they really want to say- their personal information, their feeling and opinion; but not means to memorize material which have no any contact with them.

Recognizing the importance of involvement has more significance in Mandarin Chinese teaching in America. Most America students do not learn Chinese to be a sinologist, but to have an asset for competing in the modern global society, even those students in Harvard University. This fact was also what I found when I worked at Harvard.

I’m developing a new Chinese teaching model for American students in which I especially stress students’ involvement in Chinese learning. For instance, I found many students who learned many years Chinese even did not know how to write an absence note to the teacher. In my curriculum, I give students some absence note samples in Chinese with different possible reasons, so students can pick one when they need to write a absence note to me. Then when we learned Chinese tense, I asked students pay attention the difference expressions when they will not go to school and did not go to school. So students master successfully Chinese tense which is the most difficult grammar point in Chinese learning. As a language teacher, we have to remember, language is not knowledge but a useful tool. Students first know how to use it and then they master it.