Zeit:I think some schools did away with weekly 造句，'自抄’ 笔记 exercises. It is wrong. During our time, 笔记 were all hand-copied from the blackboard by students. A lot of lower pri students cannot take it as there're a lot of things to copy - 词语搭配，句例，汉语拼音, Eng translation, etc.[/quote]All these exercises are \"effective\" but not \"efficient enough\". Yes we need to figure out the ways that can put the precious time of our kids and ours in more efficient use...Yes I do see your point. But when I think about it, again I feel it is not efficient usage of time. While the child learns listening skills and transcribing/dictation skills, he does not learn how to really apply the word in full context. There are more effective ways to retain contextual understanding eg from practicing verbally and in comprehension passages.zac's mum:[quote=\"Zeit\"]This time-honoured drill has its purpose, zac mum. Words are the basic unit of prose, the cornerstone of any language. If you lack a reasonably large word bank, your zuowen will be weak, as will your yuedu lijie (because there's biantiao, opinion qns to be hand-written).
If you don't nail that, your Paper 2 bianzi and to some extent, ciyu dapei/ciyu xuanze/cixu tiankong (some tingxie entries have Verb-Noun, Adj-Verb, Adj-Noun & Adv-Verb collocations embedded within short sentences) might not be well-reinforced.
Tingxie hones your child's LC and note-taking skills. This cannot be achieved thru xi zi. You cannot say you've mastered a lang without being able to transcribe what you hear. This practice is especially pertinent for a character-based writing system such as CL, which in case you've overlooked, has a lot of homophones and homonyms.
Moxie gives weaker students something to fall back on, in the event that they're stumped at cooking up a decent Intro or Ending for zuowen under exam conditions.
Starting at P1 level, there is already so much stress being loaded by the schools (certain schools’ spelling lists are truly ridiculously tough) on the kids and parents. Some parents expect the kids to score 100% at each spelling. Why?? And some P1 kids haven’t even reached the milestone of being able to read all words yet, or get the Chinese characters’ correct spatial positioning within a square yet. I see plenty of tension between parents and young kids all revolving around this unnecessarily high requirement of “we must test spelling and tingxie every week to make sure the kids memorize these words we deem they must know, or else”. If we take a step back, maybe we can see that in the whole grand scheme of things, long weekly spelling and tingxie lists are unnecessary workload for the goal of PSLE. Building vocab takes time and should not be so forced artificially.
