MAC Series Teacher's Training was held by Adream and Mingrun Co.
Mac Series Teacher Training Project
By Mingrun Cui
This summer, I ran a program that trained teaches on the usage of Mac Series in their lessons. The program was a collaboration of Adream, a leading NGO in China, and the Mingrun Company, of which I founded with my mother. The training took place in Beijing. The training ran for a week, from August 17th to 22nd, 2015. There were 19 teachers that came to the training. I trained them on various subjects, including pronunciations, usage of software, teaching styles and lesson plans.
I enjoyed the lessons and relished the opportunity to help Chinese English teachers. I particularly enjoyed coaching the teachers on the Mac Series software. I sincerely wish the teachers took away as much from the lessons as I did.
The teachers were all genuinely interested and interacted frequently. Below is a brief analysis of the work I did with the teachers.
1. How to profess the correct letter pronunciation to the students
This was one of the most important lessons. The teachers generally did not have a lot of patience teaching the correct letter sounds to the students. However, teaching the correct pronunciation is one of the most important, if not the most important steps in teaching English. When I taught at an orphan school, I found that a firm grasp of the letter sounds is the cornerstone to future English learning. I also taught the teachers a method that greatly helps students generate interest: give the ownership of a pronunciation of a letter to a student if he or she is very adept at pronouncing it.
2. The separation of letter sounds in a 3-letter word
This method is the most important distinction compared with the normal textbooks. In normal methods of study, once the student grasps the sounds of the letters, he or she is immediately ushered to start blending the letter sounds to form the word pronunciations. However, in the Mac Series, the student first learns how to separate the letter sounds of a word before learning how to blend them together. This is a pending patent method and, based on my experience working with the orphan children, works like a charm.
3. The pronunciation of 3-letter words
Once the students master how to separate sounds, the teachers can then teach the blends of the sound to form the words. The Mac Phonics stories is the software used here. First the children watch a short animated phonetic story that emphasizes a certain vowel. Then, words in the story that used that emphasized vowel are shown in the words section, which teaches the students how to blend the sounds. Lastly, the story is delivered as a song to add to the liveliness of the video.
4. Phonetic exceptions
In this section we went over some words that don’t adhere to the phonetics rule and how to teach them, such as fuss, puck and dill.
5. Blends of consonants
Blends are the one of the hardest parts of English to native Chinese speakers. Because of the lack of the concept in Chinese, students have a particular hard time grasping how to blend letter sounds. The Mac Series teaches consonant blends by breaking apart the words, thus giving the student a good sense on why the blend sounds a certain way.
6. Silent e and phonograms
Silent e and phonograms are very straightforward in their meanings. They should be taught only when the student has mastered all the above well.
For all the sections above, I did extensive teaching that the teachers enjoyed. Throughout my teaching, however, I noticed a few problems that exist within the Chinese education system that barricades the entire system of English learning.
The first problem is the inadequate knowledge the teachers possess. The epitome of this statement is that most teachers did not know the correct pronunciations of English letters, especially m, n, r and l. Without possessing adequate knowledge, it is impossible to teach successfully. They also lacked knowledge greatly on how the blends of English letters work, why there are exceptions and much more. When asked their major method of teaching students the pronunciations of words, they replied: point listening and reading. Point listening and reading is when a student points at each word as he listens to an audio of the text. When he is reading it later, he forcefully remembers the word’s pronunciation by sight. Even in my previous elementary school, one of the best in China, the teachers applied this horrid method.
The second major problem I noticed was the clear lack of teaching tools, such as software that had correct pronunciation and the logic of teaching. After the teaching of letter sounds (sometimes wrong letter sounds) the teachers start teaching the students how to read words. This is what is shown on the textbooks, and teachers, following the mandatory textbooks by the government, have no choice but to comply.
The third and most pressing concern is the lack of time teachers have. When asked why they do not drill with the students more thoroughly, they replied that their clock was too tight to do so. In fact, this is one of the biggest problems of time-based education. The educational bureau heavily regulates the amount of teaching (which is absurdly large) over a period of one year. Pressured by these targets, the teachers ask even more from their students who suffer.
Above are the methods I used and the problems I realized during this project. However, the problems I encountered do not solely exist in China. To change the educational system is a task that is massive but inevitable. It will take efforts from parents, students and NGOs all over the world.
