Kevin Grounds of St Bede’s College, Christchurch, completed TPDL in 2014.
Kevin loves teaching languages although he didn’t train as a language teacher. He lived in Japan for a
total of seven years and taught Japanese in New Zealand when he returned. In 2013 he switched
from teaching Japanese only to teaching both Japanese and Chinese. He had identified that there
was interest from parents and students in learning Chinese because of future trade and co-operation
with New Zealand and his school wished to introduce a Year 9 Chinese course.
Kevin became interested in Chinese language after a short trip to China in 1999 and when his school
wanted to introduce Chinese he decided to spend a year in China studying the language full time.
There is some crossover between the Japanese kanji he knew already and Chinese characters which
helped him at the start.
Deciding to seek professional development in teaching language, Kevin enrolled on the year-long
programme TPDL in 2014. The most important outcome of his doing TPDL is that Year 10 students
are now using Chinese between themselves. Kevin introduced a red light over the whiteboard in his
classroom to indicate a period of communicating in Chinese only. His students responded
enthusiastically to the challenge of speaking Chinese to the extent that if a student spoke English, a
classmate often reprimanded them in Chinese and pointed out (in Chinese) that the red light was on.
One student was heard to remark, as he left the Chinese classroom, that it would be hard to speak
English in the next lesson. The ‘red light for Chinese only’ turned out to be a transitional strategy as
in Term 4 Kevin found that the use of Chinese among students was so embedded that he no longer
needed to use the light as a reminder.
Prior to doing TPDL Kevin had not used a lot of Chinese himself in lessons. He had tended to teach a
grammar point and then expect the students to practise it. He knew that the TPDL programme
encouraged lots of target language input and he started using Chinese because TPDL expected him
to do so. He challenged himself to use Chinese for social goals in the classroom, supported by lists of
useful expressions and a CD provided by TPDL. He soon realised the benefits for the students. Now
Kevin uses Chinese for almost all his talk with students and his students interact among themselves
in Chinese.
An interesting spin off for Kevin has been that he has strong numbers of students moving on to
continue their study of Chinese. Student numbers in Year 10 have increased from just under 30 in
2014 to 63 who have chosen Chinese in 2015. He has taken some students to China and a future trip
is undoubtedly an incentive but the student interest in continuing with Chinese indicates high
student motivation. St Bede’s College is not a large school but close to 37% of year 10 students will
be learning Chinese in 2015.
In the future Kevin would like to apply for an Minstry of Education–funded immersion award to go to
China for six months or a year to improve his own language proficiency and progress along the
Learning Languages pathway. Kevin had also earlier received help from Wang Yu, National Chinese
Adviser and the Confucius Institute in Christchurch where he studied as part of Teacher Professional
Development Languages (TPDL). Wang Yu had encouraged him to take part in a 3-week trip to China
run by International Languages and Pathways (ILEP) which he found excellent.
Kevin is a convert to task-supported language teaching and has encouraged other teachers to enrol
on TPDL because he feels it has made such a difference to him and his students.