Trip Turns Tables on Easton Area Pair: While Teaching for 5 Weeks in China, Literacy Specialists Battled Language Barrier.
By Madeleine Mathias, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.
Aug. 13–For years, Janet Matthews and Joan Baldwin helped students shed their cloaks of illiteracy, guiding them to read and write as well as improve their English-speaking skills.
But the literacy specialists in the Easton Area School District were in a role reversal when they journeyed this summer to China, where they had been invited to teach in Nanjing, a bustling city of 5 million.
“We were the illiterate ones,” said Matthews, of Forks Township, Easton’s associate director of literacy. “We could not speak, read, write the language. Nor could we understand it.”
While newspapers are published in English in Shanghai, roads and advertising signs were in Chinese. And the teachers in the Sunrise Bilingual Pre-School in Nanjing, where they were asked to teach, spoke limited English.
But for five weeks starting in June, the two women shared their literacy training skills with the eight teachers, four helpers, the Chinese director — who once taught at Penn State University — and the 50 to 60 preschoolers attending the private school.
Matthews said she and Baldwin, a Kutztown resident and literacy coach at Easton’s Tracy Elementary School, learned quickly that “it was no fun being illiterate.”
The journey across continents and oceans came about when the two women heard about opportunities to teach at a Chinese bilingual school at an educational conference. They sent in their resumes in January and were soon accepted.
They knew they would not have time to learn the language before their June 4 departure, so they studied Chinese culture, Nanjing history and the Chinese approach to bilingual education. They had to get special visas from the Chinese Embassy in New York City.
From the first day, Matthews said, it was evident the Chinese are eager for their children to learn English.
Parents pay $5 a week for their child to attend the private school, often a large portion of their income.
Matthews said the Chinese 2- to 5-year-olds are expected to learn the same things that American preschoolers do. They are taught shapes, colors, numbers, letters, how to write their names and how to count — in Chinese and in English. But methods of teaching differ.
Matthews and Baldwin demonstrated with the children how to teach the English alphabet by playing bingo. And because all children have been given American names, the two teachers used those monikers as a basis for learning letters, such asking the students how many have a name with the letter D in it.
At the school, where the two women lived while in Nanjing, the bright classrooms walls were decorated with borders showing the Chinese alphabet with its character lines and the English one with its letters.
The Sunrise teachers taught the children how to make the stroke lines — some straight, some slanted — in their Chinese lessons and, with the help of the Easton teachers, showed them how to write the English alphabet.
At times, the Easton educators said they had to have the Chinese teachers interpret for them.
Baldwin said she and Matthews could read Chinese written in American letters, but they had no idea what it meant. As an example, she said “ma” has four different pronunciations and meanings.
Every school day begins with an exercise program, followed by classes from 9:30-11 a.m., then lunch of rice and dumplings or vegetables and a nap from 2:30-4 p.m.
Matthews said she never expected the children to nap, but they enter the room where small beds are lined against the wall, remove their shoes, lie down and sleep.
It was during that time that Baldwin and Matthews worked with the teachers and helpers, showing them how to use the resource materials they brought from home as well as demonstrating strategies for teaching English.
“The very next day,” Matthews said, “you would see them use them in their classrooms.”
The school has four classes, one for 2-year-olds, one for 3-year-olds, one for 3- and 4-year-olds and one for 5-year-olds.
The teachers used about $600 of their own money to buy teaching supplies such as books, games, and a parachute .
Baldwin and Matthews had some experiences that left them shaking their heads in wonderment. One was about the library the two women put together, coding about 100 books, putting them on shelves and showing the children how to use them.
The parents came in, and the two Americans did a demonstration for them. But the next morning when the Easton teachers came to class, all the books were gone. The director said she put them away for safekeeping.
Just before they headed home, Matthews and Baldwin introduced the children to America’s Fourth of July celebration. The women gave out pencils decorated with stars and stripes, American flag stickers, blowing bubble kits, tropical sunglasses and Statue of Liberty pens for the teachers.
They showed a DVD, “Americana,” taken at Easton’s Cheston Elementary School this past spring, in which students displayed their art, did skits, sang, and danced, giving the Sunrise children a look at an American school.
The trip, Baldwin said, showed her that “we are more alike than different” despite the language barrier. And both women said it was comforting to see the respect for teachers and to know that in China, the desire to learn is everything.
madeleine.mathias@mcall.com
610-559-2144
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