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[Roger]

A bit Chinese enlightenement here: I had one of these fruitful discussions that left me doubting myself...

I had "oral English" classes with 12-year olds for 4 times, and had no inkling of how they had learnt English, nor what they had learnt.
The class was terribly unruly, although the girls were nice enough, but the boys were...simply terrible!
Anyway, I did some PE with them, to let off their energy and to tame them. Quite effective, really - you must try to believe how physically unfit most of them are! After half an hour, they were pooped, and cooperative in the classroom.
But, I couldn't imagine a talk-with-me topic because too much of their attention would be focussed on interruptive behaviour constantly engaged in by boys. I decided to teach them to take notes (not something kids in China ever learn!). I taught them the notion of time - year, months, days: 12 names of months, 7 names of days, proper spelling leads to better pronunciation; other time units followed, and whole phrases and sentences. They somehow knew words such as "old" and "you" and "how", but none had learnt to say "I am twelve years OLD". Nor did they know how to ask the question themselves.
Anyway, my goal was to enable them to answer two distinct but related questions for which they had to use good, correct English:
HOW OLD ARE YOU? WHEN WERE YOU BORN?
Of course, I drilled with them the different forms of the verb to be. I did it much like we did it with European languages such as French and Italian, conjugating the verb!

Finally, the girls were able to individually answer the questions (but most of the boys couldn't). Note that I had taught them everything without any Chinese, save for the word 'yue' to indicate the names of months.
The parents had watched when we were doing the calisthenics outside, and they praised this initiative on my part; my assistant told me this much, and I hoped my employer would get wind of it.
He did, but, to my surprise I was introduced to our "headmaster", a guy I had never before met. He didn't introduce himself, and began right away by questioning whether I had any "curriculum". This he didn't say in English - because he can't speak a word of it. Instead, his underling acting as interpreter asked me this question.
I explained.
He said i failed to follow "the textbook". I explained that everybody was agreed the textbook was useless, with poor English, and unpopular.
MOral of the story: there always is a Chinese way of doing things. The only way, the CORRECT way - even if it hurts (and it does hurt the kids, not to mention myself!).
And, how am I supposed to use that textbook?

"You read aloud, and they read after you!"
So, you see: a teacher in China is the only person in the classroom that can read. And, that's what he is supposed to be teaching... apparently.

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

Quote mr pink:

you do all the talking or feel like a reporter interviewing corpses in a morgue...

Yeees, I had a holiday gig like that once, eloquent description of the experience.

Chinese largely don't see the difference between reading someone else's conversation, as in Roger's class of textbook parrots, and being able to communicate YOUR exact meaning in a socially acceptable way. I know I've got it very wrong trying with my conversation classes.


Today I've had 8 hours of classes then a speech contest...why, oh why, don't education administrators in this country see the importance of telling the teacher IN ADVANCE who they'll actually be teaching... you know, it MIGHT HELP lesson planning and learning outcomes!

[Guest]

I mainly teach Grades 3 - 6 but I do have 3 classes per week of Junior 3 (15 - 16 age).

I have found that getting them to talk to me is nearly impossible so I prepare lessons (on grammar) for them to work on for half of the 40 minute lesson and then I put words on the board and ask for opposites or synonyms etc.

I often have funny stories to tell them about what happens to me outside the school gates and after a couple of months, I think they are starting to communicate with me much better than in the beginning.

I really enjoy teaching this age group - it is a lot easier than 8 - 9 year olds who cannot understand 95% of what I am saying most of the time.