Native help local students learn Mandarin

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Lao tse, wo ai ni! (Teacher, I love you!) Imagine having spent a whole year teaching Mandarin to high school students and at the end that is one of the few phrases they can say.

"It has been a bit frustrating, but also fun and interesting," said 23-year old Liu Wenjun, a volunteer Mandarin teacher from China University who has spent the last year living in a local church and teaching her native language at a high school in Salatiga, Central Java.

"We teach an average of eight to 10 classes, twice a week," Wenjun told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of her farewell ceremony with the Ministry of National Education on Wednesday.

She explained that most of her students had never studied the language before and it was a bit difficult to control an average of 40 students in one class.

"In teaching languages, ideally, there should be a maximum of 20 students in one class," she said.

Despite the difficulties, her face lit up when she recounted how her students now practiced the language, which she said was worth the frustration she felt at the beginning of the course.

"It also helped a lot to partner with a local teacher in class," she said, explaining that she used a mix of English and Mandarin in class, with the help of Indonesian translations from her partner teacher. "My students' English is not that good either."

Wenjun is among 19 fourth-year Chinese literature and linguistics students from Guang Zhou, who have helped the Ministry of National Education teach the language in schools in the provinces of Banten, Jakarta, West Java, Central Java, East Java, North Sumatra, West Kalimantan, North Sulawesi and South Sulawesi.

The pilot project was initiated in 2004 by the education ministry in coordination with China's National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.

The young teachers spent an average of 36 hours each week introducing their language to Indonesian students, as well as giving additional training to local Mandarin teachers.

"We need to improve the quality of teachers and teaching procedures as Mandarin has been made an optional program in high schools," Minister of National Education Bambang Sudibyo said during the ceremony. "The language has also become an important language in commerce and trade, so it could benefit our students if they have such a skill."

Improvements in teaching procedures, most of the Chinese teachers said, could start by adding more class time for language study in schools.

"With only about 45 minutes of class time, we often spend more time reviewing previous lessons than teaching new lessons," said a fellow teacher, Xiong Fang, who spent her year in Pontianak, West Kalimantan.

The program has also given the teachers the opportunity of learning Indonesian firsthand by communicating with the local people. "I also learned a new language here," said Liu Heshi in broken Bahasa Indonesia.

This year, however, the program will be changed somewhat to include the sending of 50 local Chinese teachers to China for a one-month training program, organizing a teacher-training course in September in Jakarta, and holding a Chinese speech contest for high school students.

Bambang added that the program should be further enhanced by promoting Bahasa Indonesia in China's secondary schools.

"It will ease the exchange programs," he said, adding that the ministry would have to first upgrade local teachers' capability before declaring Mandarin a compulsory program in secondary education.(003)