Repetition Is Important, and That Also Applies to Learning Chinese

Gisela Jia

Nobody reading this teaching note needs to learn from here that repetition is important and critical for skill growth. However, we may more readily recognize its value when our children are practicing music, soccer or swimming than when they're practicing Chinese.

Today, I guided a Level 2 student through Unit 22 and 23 conversations. After tackling it sentence by sentence, the student's comprehension level improved from 50% to 90%. After she correctly translated the last sentence and heard my applause, she and her mom exclaimed "Woo-hoo!" and asked for a new conversation to work on.  While I assigned a new one, I asked the student to listen to Units 22 and 23 more -  as many more times as possible, "Just because now you understand these conversations, listening to them will even be more useful than when you didn't fully understand them." 

Today, I checked a student's reading of Unit 45 Short Story. He read it fluently. He used to barely finish reading a story once. Recently, his grandma has got him to read it twice. What a difference this makes! I know he would benefit from reading it a few more times after today, but I am still waiting for the right time to convince him of the value of reading things repeatedly.

Today, I chatted with a parent. Her child is finishing up Level 1. I asked her to try to get her child to re-read the stories and conversations he had already done. The same idea.

Lastly today, I was assigning some Level 1 students to write some characters as homework. I just assessed the students in class so I knew exactly which characters were missed by each student. I had the urge to single out those characters to ask them just to practice those. But I instead asked all students to write a few more than those they missed, including ones they already know how to write. I've seen too often, that, you catch the characters students miss, drill those in, but some other characters that have been already mastered then got their turn to be forgotten.

Repetition leads to fluency. Fluency means being automatic in a process. Two students, both can say a sentence correctly. One uses 5 seconds, the other one 3 seconds. The 2 second difference in each sentence would make the latter sound much more fluent than the former. This idea applies to saying single words, reading single characters, and sentences. A tiny bit longer with saying ONE word or reading ONE character adds up and makes a halting speaker and reader. Who then thinks this whole speaking and reading thing is boring? The speaker or reader himself/herself! Why? It's tiring, and how can this be fun?

In standardized English reading skill tests, one common task is simply to get testees read a whole sheet of simple words first graders can recognize (called Speeded Naming). The score is based on how much time it takes to finish reading the sheet. Speeded Naming is included in such tests because the speed of recognizing single words is a significant and reliable predictor of reading comprehension skills. This means, the faster someone can finish reading those simple words on the sheet, the stronger a reader that person is or will become.

Please be proud of your repetition work in learning Chinese language. Also know that repetition doesn't have to stand in the way of creative work at all - repetition can even make you more creative because when your mind is free from laboring at the basic level processes, it is more likely to wonder around.