Bryant professors teach Chinese to Smithfield students

Visiting faculty lead after school programs to introduce local elementary and middle school students to Chinese language and culture.

In today’s global economy, it is essential for students to be exposed to foreign languages and different cultures. These experiences should ideally occur before students reach college – or even high school for that matter. Research shows that those who start to study a foreign language at a younger age are able to learn it more quickly than older students.

To this end, Bryant’s Confucius Institute started a program this fall with the Smithfield public schools to offer programs to introduce Chinese to local youngsters. Instead of heading home to play with friends after school, some students at the William Winsor Elementary and the Gallagher Middle schools spent an hour each week learning the basics of the Chinese language and immersing themselves in the culture.

For eight weeks, fourth and fifth graders at Winsor Elementary learned Chinese sounds, letters, numbers, and the days of the week. At the conclusion of the program, the students welcomed their parents and families to the class to demonstrate what they learned.

“We just help them have fun with the language,” says Ying Zhang, a visiting Chinese professor at Bryant who taught the students at the Winsor school. She did this by decorating the classroom with Chinese characters and Chinese-style pictures, playing games, role-play, and using traditional Chinese fairy tales to teach the language. One contest challenged the students to outline China on a world map to help them compare the location and size to the United States.

During another session, the students learned about the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy. The Olympic Games, which will be held this summer in Beijing, also provided an effective teaching tool to help students learn more about China and the history of the Olympics.

Zhang, who teaches Bryant’s Chinese 305: Reading and Writing, has experience teaching a new language to non-native speakers. Before coming to the United States in July, Zhang volunteered in her daughter’s kindergarten class in China to help teach English lessons to native Chinese speakers.

Zhang describes the program for elementary school students as an enrichment course that introduces students to the Chinese culture and provides a foundation for future learning.

“Those who learn a foreign language are more confident because they know another way to express the same thing,” she says.

Students at the Gallagher Middle School learned how to introduce themselves in Chinese, use the Chinese calendar, and talk about their family in Chinese. One of the goals of the program, says Jijun Yu, another visiting Chinese professor, is to disprove the myth that Chinese is too difficult to learn.

“I hope to stimulate the students’ interest in the Chinese language and culture and build their confidence studying the new language,” says Yu, who has taught Chinese as a foreign language to international students at the China University of Geosciences since 1993.

Yu, who teaches two sections of Bryant’s Chinese 101: Introduction to Chinese Language and Culture I, introduced the students to Pinyin, a simplified set of Chinese characters that use the Latin alphabet to represent sounds in Mandarin. The four tones of Mandarin, the most common language in China, makes a Chinese poem sound like music, says Yu, which helps to engage the students.

“By teaching Pinyin together with some traditional Chinese music and poems, the students can learn Mandarin very quickly – and they say it is fun,” says Yu.

The program will be offered at other Smithfield schools beginning in late January.