The Centre
We started the Eastern Road Language Centre in 2014 in Darwin to provide high quality teaching of language and culture, initially for Mandarin Chinese, but potentially also for other languages in the future. Initially we offered a full range of Chinese classes, but we found that few adults were taking them. In this we suffered competition from the Confucius Institute of Charles Darwin University, which could afford to charge relatively little for their classes, even making the free for staff of the university.
In 2015 we started running classes for Chinese background children, and by 2016 these became our mainstay. While these children already spoke some Chinese, their parents wanted them to both write and speak well educated Chinese, and other programs available to them were not accomplishing this. We heard reports of children learning very little after several years in available Saturday classes.
Our classes were never very large, and we now see this as an asset: it means that we can get to know our students well and give them considerable individual attention. Especially as time has passed we have become less worried about our Centre's commercial success than its educational success. In addition, when we moved to Perth in 2021 we lost our dedicated classroom space, but keeping classes small means we can offer them in a living area in our own home.
While the Centre has specialised in Mandarin, from 2015 to 2017 some tutoring for the IELTS test of English was provided through the Centre, and from 2019 to 2022 some consultancy work on Australian Indigenous languages was also completed under the auspices of the Centre.
Our programs have been based on the following beliefs about language teaching and learning:
Languages should be taught by professionals, with relevant educational qualifications and experience. Too often we have seen language schools and even universities employing poorly prepared teachers whose main qualification is only that they speak some variety of the language.
Language study should be guided by purpose, in two ways:
Purpose determines what should be studied. For example, if you just want to be able to use spoken Chinese to help you get around in China, you may not need to learn how to read Chinese books and newspapers.
Purpose also guides how best to study. If your study focusses on purposeful and meaningful uses of language, it will be far more interesting than meaningless drills and exercises.
Learning a language for practical, everyday purposes can be thought of as learning how to accomplish increasing numbers of these purposes through language, such as how to take a taxi, how to order a meal, and so on.
Learning language involves learning culture. You can't really learn to use a language properly without learning the cultural understandings and practices that go with it.
Language and cultural practices vary across China. China is a richly diverse nation, so that even Mandarin is not spoken in exactly the same way by all Chinese, and cultural practices can also vary between places and even social groups. As you progress in your studies you should be learning to cope with occasional regional and individual differences.
Spoken Chinese can be learned without studying Chinese characters. Many Chinese seem to believe that the study of Chinese must include the study of written Chinese characters. This is not surprising: when someone learns English, we expect them to become literate in English as well as able to speak it, and for some purposes this is equally important for Chinese learners. For those learners who are only interested in using the spoken language, however, gaining equal fluency with written characters is a great burden that is not absolutely necessary.
Good pronunciation is important for spoken Chinese, including proper use of tones. We have heard of occasional Chinese teachers who seem to think that it is not important for learners to master Chinese tones, as if it didn't matter if one called one's mother (ma in first tone) a horse (ma in third tone). While many Chinese speakers will try to understand foreigners speaking such poor Chinese, as learners progress in their language studies their pronunciations should keep improving so as to avoid such problems. We believe in laying a good foundation for proper pronunciation early in the study of the language and continuing to foster it throughout later language study. While tones may seem daunting to some Chinese learners at first, they are not really as difficult as one might imagine.
For Chinese study it is important to learn pinyin transcription. Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese using the same alphabet as English. It may not be an ideal way of doing this, but it does show the pronunciation of words and it is widely used, even by Chinese speakers, in dictionaries and for inputting Chinese characters into computers and mobile phones. In studying a language, it can help to back up the spoken language with writing, and pinyin provides a better way of doing this than Chinese characters.
Language study should be as interesting and enjoyable as possible. Learning a language normally takes a great deal of time and effort, but it need not be total drudgery. Part of making language study interesting is to keep it purposeful, focusing on meaning and calling attention to cultural aspects of the language.