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[ChinaEFLteacher]

i had all my 1st yr students choose and english name at the beginning of the term. one girl came and announced she was satan. i asked her if she knew the meaning and she smiled. it can be fun and a good way for them to learn vocab if they can choose an english name, and ease our burden of trying to pronounce their chinese names.

[hamel]

i think "changing peoples' names" is a little strong. a lot of dogmatic opinions about this. but at least in the korean culture it can add to one's english class as koreans don't usually call each other by first names, but use a title like student or teacher instead of using their name.

i like to call students something and often. i give them a list of boys and girls names and they choose one. it must be a proper name for my class and i explain that it is only to practice english in my class and for fun.
works for me. and my students are teenagers--i had a spanish and german name in those classes in high school too.

[kev7161]

Some more thoughts on this subject:

1. Having ten different groups of kids of 25-32 kids per class, it can be daunting remembering a bunch of Chinese names. The first day of class, we all made nameplates on construction paper. If they already had an English name, great! If not, I had them write their Pinyin name - - then I could find the part that was easy to remember and call them that: Yang, Dong, Rui, etc. Now that most have adopted an English name, I just had them write that name in black marker above their Chinese name. It's taking some time, but I am getting to know all these names!

2. If I have more than one of the same English name in the same class, they become Michael One, Michael Two, and so on.

3. The first day of class, I passed around a piece of paper and asked them to write their English name (if they had one), their Chinese name in Pinyin, and their Chinese name in Chinese characters. Now if I have to refer to a student to another Chinese teacher, I can just show them the name. By the way, not a single student wrote their name with tonal marks. If I mispronounce, it's not my fault.

4. I also assign numbers to each student and have them write that number on each assignment or test. Then I can quickly put papers in order (or ask a student to do it for me) and can see right away who didn't do their homework.

[richtx1]

thelma -- I'm sure you've noticed that Mexicans hispanize foreign names... usually. I used to pass "Escula Principessa Diana" across the street from "Escula Carlos Marx". I used to speculate on what the headlines on the sports pages would read -- "Commies kill Royals". On the other hand, the school down the street is "Colegio John F. Kennedy".

Just use what your students prefer. U.S. schools are not a very good model for teaching foregin languages.

[Kurochan]

At the beginning of the semester I always give students a choice to be called by their Chinese name or English name. I leave it up to them. I used to let students chose whatever "name" they wanted, but this year I tried to introduce the concept of nicknames -- that there are only certain things that can be names in English, and other words (like various nouns and adjective -- Banana, Happy, etc.) can be called nicknames, and are used when talking to friends. I thought it was a good conceptual distinction, and would help them avoid snickers when introducing themselves to foreigners -- people will accept "My nickname is Shark" better than "My name is Shark," I think. Generally, I don't say anything to the students about their names, unless I think the names will bring ridicule on them for some reason (like my student this year called Corn), they have some extra meaning they didn't know (like Fanny or Cherry), or they've chosen a name for the wrong sex. But, if a student REALLY wants to be called Fanny, or a girl wants to be called Victor, then I let them do it.

[hamel]

i'm not comfortable with some strange western "nickname"--usually i demand that a "nickname" be a proper noun for a boy or a girl. who knows, it may come in useful when they travel or meet a foreign person and actually use english.

but i'm sure teaching in a western country or an eastern country changes what works.

[Liam]

I once taught a class and had just got to the point where I remembered most of their names, then one day they turned up to class straight after a chemistry class and had all given themselves new English 'names'.... they'd all named themselves after elements of the periodic table.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Magoo]

I looked on the Internet to find names and their meanings/linguistic origins. Most Chinese students seem to be more interested in the sound-fair enough, as this is often the case with their own names-but older students often like been associated with victory, charity or beauty. To preempt anyone giving my wife a name like Candy, Trixie, Sugar or any other soft-porn star (she's our school librarian ), I named her myself. Her own, Chinese given name, chosen by her father for its actual meaning, translates as 'Pure'. I still can't find an appropriate name for our daughter (the appropriately-named 'Thunder'). Any suggestions?

[Sheep-Goats]

Thai names are quite hard to read or pronounce (due to Thai being tonal, plus the fact that many of their names are distantly derived from Pali Buddhist terminology, which screws up the spelling/pronounciation relationship -- the King's coronation name is an extreme example of this), fortunatly they all also have a one-syllable name that's usually easy to pronounce, and English-derived names are currently in vogue (Bomb, Mint).

However, there are lots of nicknames that consist of three vowles (Au, Aea, Aou and Aeu are all different names and all hard to pronounce) and the tones can make it impossible for a non-trained English speaker to say their names correctly (the name Pat often gets changed to Pat -- two different tones, the English name "Pat" being almost completely wrong to a Thai's ear for the Thai nickname Pat, which means Goodness and is a girl's name). Couple this with the fact that the nicknames are sometimes truncated versions of their full names and you run into a lot of problems (for instance, one of my students, whose name was Turdsak, had the nickname Turd -- said exactlly as you say it in English).

In one class I changed their nicknames if their Thai names were hard to say. They thought this was rather funny -- to change Au (ahhh) to Otto, for example. But, in truth, if they go abroad they're going to have someone do that to them sometime.

My own name is nearly impossible for Thais to pronounce and so I give them a Thaicized version to say. I would adopt a Thai nickname but I'm not sure of all the connotations of the names available.

[Sheep-Goats]

[Deborann]

I don't use English names for my students for several reasons:
1. If I need to talk to a Chinese teacher about a student, s/he will only know the Chinese name and trying to describe the student - the one with dark hair and glasses - doesn't work! The results sheets are all in Hanzi, so I ask the students to give me the pinyin and match it with the Hanzi, which I am slowly trying to learn.

2. I think it is insulting to them to be expected to change their names - particularly in their own country.

3. I do mispronounce - many times as I call the roll for all 340 students, but I have made a deal with them that they will correct my pronunciation - and they do. Part of our 'mutual teaching' relationship - they correct my Chinese, I correct their English - we are benefiting each other.

4.The ones who have been given English names have some odd names and I find it uncomfortable to use names that I know would not be accepted in any English speaking country.

5. Some students have asked for English names and I will help them choose a name that is not too old fashioned and is as close as possible to their Chinese name - Rae for Rui. But they use these names privately - not with me.

6. I would NEVER EVER call a student by a number! Talk about institutionalisation and degradation!

7. Learning the names of 340 students in your home country is difficult and takes time - why not expend the same effort here?

[Roger]

To each according to their capabilities...
If you feel you must memorise hundreds of CHinese names with the correct intonation, please, go ahead. Not my cup of tea, though. I am glad they choose English or other western names; some find it cool, while others merely do it out of peer pressure.

But I don't see how this should be regarded as "dehumanising" or "degrading". Chinese teachers don't bother much about proper names either; students are "xuesheng", a whole class and mass of them, with no right to individuality apart from an occasional penalty earned for laziness. THat's why they have numbers.
Sticking to Chinese names only makes matters enormously more complicated. Chinese teachers are slackers too - too lazy to check whether each and every student is present. They look around and see no chair is unoccupied, then are satisfied. Then, students sneak out of their classes. In other classes, students sign in for other students. Who notices? Not a CHinese teacher!

[Deborann]

Calling students by number and not name smacks to me of a 'prison' mentality - these people have no individuality, they are just numbers. In my experience students in the west will also have a student number - mine was engraved on my brain by the end of final exams - but NO lecturer ever called me by number instead of my name. It was for admin purposes only, and privacy purposes when results were published in large daily newspapers prior to the advent of internet.

I will not remember every student I teach - and unless I had them for an extended period in the west I didn't either. But I do remember the bright ones, the ones who stand out one way or another in class, and it's not so difficult to remember those names.

My smallest class is over 40, my largest above 100, but each week my pronunciation improves and I add at least one other student I can confidently call on by name to my memory!

It also saves on admin work at the end of the semester when I have to hand in results - the names are already in Hanzi and pinyin, so no additional work in translating Fred 1 to Zhou Lei Ping.

I have also found that they fairly regularly change their English names - depending on who is currently fashionable in the music/movie world.

[hamel]

deborann: so do you spend the entire class calling chinese names? it sounded like you had a huge number of students at one time, but i guess that number is for all of your classes.

i disagree with the dehumanizing concept. maybe the students are interested in western culture and that may help to motivate them. sounds like you have little experience teaching conversational english. when you use english names it changes the environment from say a chinese or korean environment--my students also have numbers, and sometimes i check their number for a speaking test or something. but i've heard so many dogmatists on this subject--thanks for the point of view.

your new post came as i was writing this message. when i taught in the university most students already had a proper english name or nickname, but the teens can be against it. usually one or two kids in a class reject the idea. i'd rather use their korean then force the issue too strongly--and i prefer traditional western names usually. it can be strange using their korean "first" name as you would with a westerner (while speaking english). korean use last name first, like kim jun gun. but many kids get nicknames in the private institutes here. are there many language schools in china?