About Carden

Mae Carden and Her Theories

 

Who was Mae?

Mae Carden was a New York school teacher in the 1930s and 1940s who built a way of teaching English to first or second generation immigrant children, non-native speakers who wanted to learn to speak in a way indistinguishable from the English speakers around them. Presently, the method is taught in some thirty Carden schools in the United States which also use Carden materials and theories for teaching other subjects such as math or science. To help immigrant children along, pronunciation was a central feature of Ms. Carden’s work, a feature which makes it attractive to parents of Chinese students in 2007 who want their children to learn to speak English with a North American accent.

 

What are controls?

Carden’s controls, which will be trained in more detail below, are designed to provide a set of “tools” students can use to discern the accurate pronunciation of new words they see when they are reading. In some respects, the controls are phonetic descriptions of English pronunciation;  through using thme, students of Carden China have learned to avoid common pitfalls Chinese speakers often face such as difficult “r” sounds and “l” sounds.

 

What else does this method have?

Additionally, the language method essentially comprises a series of lessons involving reading, workbooks, spelling exercises and sentence analysis as well as daily drills, quizzes and tests. These materials are designed to be integrated so that progress in one area reinforces progress in other areas; that is, the lessons are horizontally coordinated so that as students advance in, say, the reading book, they advance simultaneously in the spelling book or in the workbooks. This way, words, sounds or grammatical constructions encountered while reading will be seen again in a different exercise.

 

Experience, Identify, Define: What’s that?

This embodies an important feature of Mae Carden’s central vision about language acquisition, a three-tiered scheme which she refers to as “experience, identify, define.” On her view, students of a language naturally first experience words as unintelligible objects, objects which nonetheless have a shape and position and significance that, in most cases, will not be immediately apparent. After such an exposure to words and language from an inchoate din, students will be guided by teachers to “identify” the words, perhaps by hearing them, looking for them in paragraphs. This way the words will gradually become more familiar until finally, students complete the process and learn to “define” the words, using them in various contexts. Furthermore, the theory applies not only to new words, but also to more complex features of language such as grammar.

 

Why is the Carden method good for China?

When students learn English using Carden for many years, they constantly repeat difficult sentences – sentences that are too difficult in certain respects.  By reaching to grasp the natural cadence and feel of English as a spoken language, and by exercising this daily, students over time develop an intuitive sense of how it feels to speak English. This is something difficult to learn as an adult, say, or through conventional ways of learning language that overemphasize rote memorization. Even the best conversational schools and ESL programs come up short when it comes to helping people internalize the language. Mae Carden hit upon a way of practicing the language and burning it deep into your brain. This is one of the most important goals of our program. That is, elementary school children have their entire lives to learn new vocabulary or to talk abstractly about conjugation and clauses and participles; we teach them more important features of language it would be hard for them to pick up when they are in college or even high school.

 

What’s the history of Carden in China?

As of Fall 2007, Carden China is entering its seventh year.  It began with two first grade classes who advanced through the grades until they “graduated” last year. Each year the department added two to four first grade classes who have likewise progressed one grade at a time. As expected, each new year brought new challenges that were met by various generations of teachers in diverse ways. Now that the department has grown to its full size, our systems are finally taking the shape of routine and most of the biggest bugs in adapting Carden for Chinese students have been quashed.