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[Midlothian Mapleheart]

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Middy

[burnsie]

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

Edited to remove offensive content.

Middy

[profM]

I just cannot fully comprehend why they insist on flooding the schools and universities with Conversation or Oral English classes.

My best guess is that the students have insisted on this because they love to talk in Chinese so they lust to talk in English. Talk is at the center of Chinese communication as it is in most cultures, although written Internet chat is big in the U.S. now. The Chinese Literati developed written Chinese language thousands of years ago as their own special province in their service to the princes and warlords. Now, thousands of years later most people, including many college students, still cannot read or write Chinese easily. The brilliant, beautiful written Chinese language is still mainly the province of an elite corps of intellectuals. The tension between this reality of the origins of written Chinese and the ubiquitous pride in Chinese culture and tradition was not overcome even while the Maoists aimed to unseat elitist traditions at the beginning of the revolution

So talk talk talk is what they want to be able to do - in English - because that is the primary, experiential, sensory, sensual way to make contact with the happening West. Brain Drain research shows that as many as 85% of Chinese students (cf. 75% of European students!) studying in the West have not returned to China, although that is changing some recently.

Nevertheless, language learning is best when the four skills - the two receptive ones of listening and reading and the two expressive ones of speaking and writing are all taught together. These skills all reinforce one another. Grammar and vocabulary need to be reinforced and advanced for 95% of the EFL students in any country. Reading and listening are crucial for helping to get grammar internalized and for expanding vocabulary. Repeated success in reading and listening also help to build confidence.

Talk Talk Talk is a bad prescription for students that have plenty of grammar difficulties and quite limited vocabularies. There are so many good EFL textbooks that present fine lessons requiring reading, vocabulary building and grammatical review along with exercises for talking, listening and writing. Why not always use them even when the course is called Oral English? These textbooks have the students' talk focus on the readings and encourage the use of new vocabulary.

Perhaps the administrators wish to give the Talk Talk Talk concession to the students because they were once the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution and the students called all the shots then. Now, the students can command little. It is unfortunate that the creation of the "Conversational English Farce" has been a result.

The Party has done a very impressive job at taking suggestions, advice and even direction from foreigners in implementing some dramatic improvements in China's manufacturing industries. I wonder if they have the feeling that this has lead to the weakening of both socialist and traditional values and for those reasons they have not accepted any of the complaints and advice of the vast number of foreign ESL, English and academic experts in China in the same way as they have done in the manufacturing industries and as they are about to do in the banking industry and other industries.

If the education system in China will ever accept foreign input, I think that it should begin by reviewing the suggestions for improving ESL teaching.

[Roger]

An amusing attempt, proM, at explaining the current malaise, but not hitting the mark.
First of all, yes, literati have in China always been above the babbling crowds who could never hope to be even half as literate as their elite, and that's true especially today.
But the West has had a written tradition for thousands of years too - to borrow your own phrase. In fact, writing evolved in the West earlier than in China (the world's first alphabet was created as early as 5000 years ago, then it vanished, then it was replaced by a newer one).
There is, perhaps, one reason why Chinese learn differently that is connected to the scripts in use both in other countries and in China: the CHinese characters do not offer much of information on how to pronounce them, hence a far greater need to memorise and drill. Recently a new study was published that purports to show that the human brain has different areas for learning scripts: the Chinese script learning area is located in one place, while learners of alphabet-based languages use a different brain part.
There might be something to this but it is wrong to ascribe it to writing alone since you do not necessarily learn language AND the script in which it is encoded (though for most learners this holds true).
It is, on the other hand, undeniably true that Chinese have to learn by rote a far bigger part of their knowledge than we do, and that may inform their learning habits. Thinking laterally is not taught them at an early age - in contrast to learners elsewhere.
It could be reasoned then that it would benefit CHinese students if someone taught them mnemotic tricks (techniques that help memorise and use one's meoruy to its capacity). Buit this is not the case.

The question who brought the oral practice to the Chinese English classrooms is easy to answer: it was American universities back in the 1980s.
They all were deluding themselves in Chomskyan fashion to what's best for students learning a second tongue. The first schools - at that time only normal schools and a select few universities in the mainland - were hooking up with tertiary institutions in the U.s.A. as early as 1978. It was assumed that Chinese English teachers are competent in teaching "substantial" subjects such as grammar, while native speakers were needed to give the subject a practical application.
This division of labour is partly to blame. Now we are regarded as the English monkey idiots that do not know our language but have to practise it with our learners.

[profM]

Roger Roger. Other written languages surely may have evolved earlier than the Chinese, but each set of codes among both the oral and written modes have loads of political implications. Special little twists and turns from Latin to Italian, French, Spanish or Portuguese, for example, make it difficult for newbies to fit into the newer community. It may always take a generation to master the speaking of a second language. Political result: group cohesion at the expense of outsiders. Written language can even wind up excluding members of the native community. I don't think the evolution of language has been merely the result of a series of popularizations of spontaneous changes. I think guys (later gals too--e.g.,at Time Magazine) have sat around and thought up strategies to establish languages within different emergent cultures. The literati in Asia moved out into some pretty difficult areas with the pictographic writing, perhaps taking Sanskrit as a lead, I am really only speculating. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that calculation of ingroup/outgroup results was a primary political motive and aesthetics and other concerns revolved around that. The relatively very small populations of thousands of years ago may well have had folks somewhat like us forming sort of language club activities that created some of the foundations for the differences between languages.

Anyway, such stimulating [I here had typed in italics the Latin word*beep* which means 'along with' and it was beeped electronically] "amusing" speculations weren't the central point of my post. The central point was the Problem of the Oral English Farce and what I see as part of a Solution. My focus was intended to be the four skills of reading and writing and speaking and listening to be kept integrated in the ESL classroom as part of a solution to the Oral English Farce.

[Alex_P]