Streaming Learners

It is almost impossible to organise the above-mentioned four categories of students typically found in Chinese courses at Australian universities in a systematic way for teaching purposes.

Although teachers would want learners to be grouped into similar language competency levelsso that they can achieve more efficient use of class time，make better lesson preparation and delivery and maximise student participation.In reality，mixed-ability groupings are not uncommon.The most common practice is to stream students into a beginners’stream，a post-secondary stream and a background/native stream.Quite often，first-year university students of Chinese are placed in classes on the basis of their prior Chinese learning experience.While the beginner and native speaker categories can be determined relatively easily，the heterogeneity and f luid nature of the post-secondary learners makes this a problematic categorisation.

The name“post-secondary”category obscure a complex composition of these students.A close look at these learners as a whole reveals that there are three quite different sub-groups making up this category，varying in their language learning experience，personal histories，age，and time of commencement of Chinese studies in their high school.The first type are those post-secondary learners who are in fact like beginning learners due to the nature of their high school studies.The second type are learners from Chinese backgrounds，who were born into families of Chinese backgrounds and have had exposure to MSC or a Chinese dialect.The third type is native speakers of Chinese who have come from a Chinese-speaking country or region to study in secondary schools in Australia.

These different types of learners vary with regard to their proficiencies in Chinese，but are usually not so proficient that they could fit easily into a native speaker group，and they have some Chinese skills so that they cannot be in the same class with complete beginners.Their Chinese skills range from the low to the high ends of the competency spectrum，even though they have passed Chinese in high school certificate studies.This variation is usually strongest around familiarity with and mastery of characters.Further，there is movement of students from the post-secondary to the beginners’category.Predictably，it is poor recognition and lack of facility with writing characters as required at university that induces students to move to beginners’classes，but because they are much more advanced in spoken Chinese learning than the beginners who have just started learning Chinese，the move complicates the original basis of the streams.

Of course，mixed proficiency groups can be taught creatively to bring benefits to learners，incorporating peer tutoring and multi-directional support among these learners.However，when proficiency differences are great enough，tensions will arise，with the inevitable consequence of boredom for more advanced students and loss of confidence for the less advanced，with both of these two types of students demotivated.While these issues are mainly a concern to curriculum and syllabus designers，and the creative use of information and communication technologies and other innovative delivery and electronic or digital mediated individualisation activities can assist to diversify and enrich program delivery.This also brings into classrooms the effects and realities of extra-educational sociologies of language.