There are graded reader sets that you can buy that have the pinyin text separate from the Chinese text, instead of right over it. The way I use them with my 8-going-on-9-year-old (3rd grader) is to first read the text without pinyin and tell her to skip the characters she doesn't know by saying "something" for each one. Then I give her the text with the pinyin, which she reads through completely. Then we go back to the text without the pinyin and read it again.
Here is the set we are working through right now:
Start Reading Chinese Band 5
http://www.chinasprout.com/shop/BSG148
I have a few opinions about pinyin, now that we've been through it. I'll write more on this in successive postings. The thing is, I didn't grow up with pinyin. In fact, all of my generation did not. We didn't have it. We grew up learning Zhuyin Fuhao or "Bo Po Mo Fo." When my child first started in MI during K, I had no idea what modern Pinyin was all about. Just that it had come later from the Mainland, that it was widely accepted and supposedly the most systematic, compared to former renditions of transliterations.
It took me some time to learn that it simply mirrored "Bo Po Mo Fo" but with the Latin script. Of course, I had to re-learn "Bo Po Mo Fo," which I had forgotten. It took me the school year. But now it's a total breeze. And while pinyin is easy for my child, now, too, at the end of the day, I am better at it than she is. And this gives me insight into why it's usage and "attachment" must be controlled. I'll say more another time.
It seems that learning pinyin is pretty controversial. And for good reason. Needless to say, you have to figure out when you're going to push back against it. I'm not in the camp of folks that think pinyin should happen earlier and is, in fact, the thing you most need because technology now makes it so easy to use it. It's true - technology has made it easier. Many native speakers of Chinese will comment on how technology and pinyin has resulted in them no longer able to write when looking at a blank page and given a pen or pencil. But you have to keep in mind that they grew up with the "old school" way of learning characters in the first place. To lose the ability to scrawl on a blank page but not lose the ability to have sight recognition... This is something very, very important to know and accept. Your kid is going through a different process.
I'm really liking this "something-something" trick. My child is less frustrated if I let her go ahead and read while filling in with English "something-something." And as we cover more stories like this, I see that it helps her ability to make inferences, which is a key "reading skill" for English, as well. One reads plenty of words for which one does not know its definition in English. Just that one can sound out the word, given the phonetic representation on the page.
I think that learning how to cope with not knowing Chinese characters while still proceeding to read is critical in giving kids a hand-hold onto a language that is very, very, very difficult to learn. Becoming an independent reader in Chinese is one of the hardest things, even for native speakers of the language. At the moment, my child feels very empowered by the "something-something" stand-in's. It means she doesn't have to stop the flow of reading.
Of course, it's important to pick a text wherein your child knows most of the characters.
Next up, since finding these pinyin + pinyin-free texts is challenging, we're going to make our own from the books that have all pinyin in them.
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