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Plan B
Joined: 11 Jan 2005
Posts: 266
Location: Shenzhen
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 Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 4:09 pm Post subject: |
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| gengrant wrote: |
and the scary thing for me is that I used to think that most (read: all) Chinese could read and write English very well...they just needed help with spoken english. This "essay" really made me change the way I think.
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I figured out quite quickly that students' writing ability was well under-par, yet they always claim that they know written English inside-out. With reading, Chinese students, often com across a word, and somehow are unable to guess the word through context. Chinese students are often obsessed with accumulating an immense level of vocabulary, without concentrating on the more fundamental aspects which make a text readable, such as correct grammar and consistant discource.
I believe one of the biggest responsibilities of an ESL teacher in China is to encourage students to convert what they need to say, while using the words that they commonly know - without resorting to dictionaries.
Since my time in China, I have had to prove-read similar documents, and I have full sympathy with the predicament that the OP finds himself in.
Due to the extense empasis on learning new words, as Chinese students have to do with Chinese characters. students instead need to be trained to elicit meaning from words from sentences, and then use the words they know to describe the sentence.
A technique I use sometimes, is to present the students with a sentence containing a word that they aren't familiar with. Two examples.
"Everytime I drink too much, I have a big hangover in the morning"
"If you drive around a corner too quickly, your car might overturn"
First, without the use of dictionaries, the students have to elicit meaing for the two words. Secondly, they must rewrite these sentences without using the two new words. e.g. Everytime I drink too much, I feel a little sick, tired, and my head spins.
Such methods are not, unfortunately, going to overhaul the education system that they are used to (which isn't inherantly bad, but a product of the complexity and depth of the Chinese language), but if used regularly enough, can encourage a different method of language application.
Strictly on the academic level, it needs to be very clear that big words are not going to impress the examinators, and that readability is key to the overall success of the essay. |
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kev7161
Joined: 06 Feb 2004
Posts: 5880
Location: Suzhou, China
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 10:58 pm Post subject: |
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My very first semester here, I had 2 Senior Three classes - - once a week, only for the first half of the school year. There was no textbook and, after two weeks of stone-cold silence, I went out to find something that we could use in class. I found a book about (possible) new vocabulary words and how they are used in context. I would copy pages and have students read aloud the short passages (to help improve pronunciation) - - most of the exercises were multiple choice, by the way. I would try to explain things in simpler terms and then group them in pairs so they could go over them together and try to figure things out, etc. etc.
It was like pulling teeth! These kids were so resistant to even trying to learn (a majority anyway) that, in my opinion, it was just a waste of time - both for them and for me. The loved the last two sessions we had when I showed a DVD.  |
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