A Testimonial from Singapore and The Latest Josh's Performance in Chinese

12 Apr 2021

Josh is a 14 year old Chinese boy diagnosed with ASD since young. He attends a special school in Singapore, he is learning academic subjects using only English, as he has language impairment. The home environment is English speaking and occasional some Mandarin from grandmother during meal time who does not stay with the family. Before lesson with Teacher Ming Ling, Josh could count 1 to 10, identify body parts, and understand some simple phrases like eat, drink, go home in Chinese.

Josh started learning Chinese with Teacher Ming Ling on 17 Jan 2021 through zoom. Teacher started teaching numbers beyond 10, addition and subtraction and time reading. Josh’s interest in Chinese was aroused and was hungry for more, he started asking daily things like cup, bowl and many things “what is this in Chinese?”

His vocabulary in Chinese increases exponentially, through the reading of vocabulary in the textbook written by Ming Ling.

After that, Ming Ling progressed on to teach Hanyu pinyin. Somehow some of the Chinese phonetic sounds is similar to English, so Josh was able to pick up fast. In Chinese, there are 4 different tones to phonics. Josh was able to read the hanyu pinyin, but the pronunciation was still quite off from the actual sounds. After a few lessons of corrections, now Josh is able to read the hanyu pin yin with the correct tones with 70% accuracy under the patient guidance of Teacher Ming Ling.

Knowing that most ASD children have difficulties with the usage of “You and I” in English, they tend to get confused. Ming Ling addressed this in Chinese, using 3 people interaction to teach first, second and third person voice. After 2 lessons, Josh is no longer confused in his usage of personal pronouns in English.

Josh is weak in semantic understanding of English Language, usually he is unable to answer “who, what, where, when, why, how” types of questions. Knowing his weakness, Ming Ling tailored the lesson to strengthen this area in Chinese. She planned a lesson using a diary of a boy as context, helped Josh to link ideas, organise his thoughts, test his understanding of sequences of events, before and after, stimulate his thinking asking Josh to guess the ending using contextual cues. For example, it was a diary of a boy who was late to catch a bus. When the bus was about to drive off, a friend in the bus stopped the bus driver, Teacher Ming Ling asked, “Did the boy manage to board the bus?” Josh thought that the boy missed the bus, Teacher Ming Ling showed him the cues in the story and guided him.

This week, Teacher Ming Ling moved on to holding a conversation with Josh in Chinese using a story in more details. Now Josh is able to answer the questions with lesser prompts.

A lot of thoughts and care has gone into every lesson planning to motivate, stimulate and cater according to Josh’s needs and weaknesses. No amount of thanks can express my gratitude to Teacher Ming Ling. Thank you Teacher!

14 Aug 2021

To date, Josh has attended 27 lessons with Teacher Ming Ling. Josh is able to hold simple conversation with family members, in terms of asking questions and answering in Chinese. Josh first learnt nouns in Chinese, Teacher Ming Ling expand his vocabulary and sentence structure by adding on adjective to the nouns. Teacher did a lot of dialogues and comprehension of Chinese passages to enhance his understanding. Every lesson, teacher will prepare a context that is familiar to Josh. For example, National Day and trip to the zoo theme in August. This also helped Josh in his understanding of English text comprehension.

Teacher Ming Ling started to introduce Chinese characters to Josh and slowly removed the hanyu pinyin. Now Josh is able to recognise and read many Chinese characters with ease. His confidence in usage of Chinese increases exponentially.

16 Sep 2022

After Josh has made a lot of progress in learning Chinese, such as accumulating over 500 vocabulary words, being able to type in Chinese characters, the ability to do self-correction when noticing his own mistakes, and he can type in Chinese corresponding to the Chinese textbook of Singapore. Josh was never given any extra homework in the Chinese language other than attending his online class once a week. Yet what impresses me the most is Josh can retain most of the learning content that he learns from each class. As well, unexpectedly, Josh is no longer responding to questions with the pattern of echolalia. He can use pronounces and possessive pronouns, and answer “5W” questions in both English and Chinese. Josh, you are just such an amazing keen leaner. I am so proud of you and admire your strengths! Message from Teacher Ming-Ling

Josh can recognizes mistake (in red) and do self-correction (green one)