Chinese 1: Enter Walking, Exit Flying
Diana Yiqing Sun, lecturer in Chinese language, strides into the class, smiling and talking as she animates the room with lights, overheads, and screens. The message is clear: "We’re not wasting a second of the fifty packed minutes ahead." This is Chinese 001. Sun knows it’s a tough class for English speakers, but she loves the challenge, as, apparently, do the sixty or so students in the three sections of the introductory course this semester. One of them, sophomore Greta Mattessich (Ge Yan), repeats the assessment of several other students in her class: "Diana is wonderful," and tops it with, "I love this class."
Sun, recognized this year for outstanding teaching by the Kroepsch-Maurice Awards, says that her guiding principles for all teaching are "to be effective and to be enjoyable." She wants students — whether they study Chinese for one semester or achieve fluency — "to speak beautiful Chinese and to write beautiful characters." She began the semester with words whose sounds exist in English, but now a couple of months into the term, students are well into tackling the sounds unique to Chinese, as well as Chinese tones, changes in which vary a word’s meaning. "Chinese is very musical," says Sun, who writes rhymes to help students lodge the correct sounds in their brains.
The class proceeds with a mixture of oral, written, and group repetitive drills familiar to any language class. Sun’s warm smiles and quick interactions leave no student feeling rebuffed or too long in the spotlight. She doesn’t challenge the timidity and quiet responses of some students, but rather praises good tones and pronunciations, corrects gently and swiftly, seeks a repetition, praises again, and moves on.
Sympathy for the beginner
Sun, a Beijing native, began learning English at age 16 at a foreign language school in China and later became an English major at Capital Teachers University. "I was very timid. I was so scared when the teacher pointed a finger at me to answer questions," she says. "But, it gave me a good understanding of different personalities and how different people learn."
Sun taught English to Chinese students and Chinese to American students for four years in China before coming to the United States as a scholarship student. She interned and taught at Washington University in St. Louis and then at the Middlebury College Language School for eight years.
Practice makes perfect
Sun and her husband, Professor John Yin, have devised enrichments to help immerse students and find, as Sun says, "a greater sense of achievement." As one example, Sun requires students to use a CD at home to practice their vocabulary and tones and adds online resources and texts to aid learning Chinese characters and pinyin (the transliteration of Chinese ideograms into the Roman alphabet). Students in advanced Chinese classes (Sun also is teaching Chinese 3 and 5) get individual conference time and tutoring with a teaching assistant.
Residents of Chinese House, home to fourteen students with special interest in Chinese culture, get special attention from Sun each week. "Fridays at 3:30 is tea hour," Sun says, "we have slide shows or movies, and recently, we took the students to Montreal to Chinatown and the botanical gardens." In the summer, Sun and Yin and their children accompany UVM students to China for an intensive, two-month course at Yunnan University, where most of the students remain through the fall semester.
Sun enjoys working with all levels, but takes special pride in teaching beginning students and in launching many of them into exploration of her homeland culture and language: "We give them a solid foundation. …It is a good start," she says. "They can be flying after a year."
