Job Discussion Forums

[wulfrun]

are there any?

particularly thinking about university level. the students mostly have english classes with chinese teachers of english, where they prepare for CET/TEM, do reading, listening, vocab, and grammar. so the waijiao "oral English" lessons are best focused on speaking, leaving out the other stuff.

the standard books dont work - cutting edge, headway, inside out, etc. all do the integrated approach, not enough speaking.

'natural english' seems pretty appropriate in places. also saw 'communication strategies' printed by thomson, seems good.

for just activating communication, i quite like the task-based Resource Packs made by 'Inside Out' and 'Reward'. for getting discussions going, 'Taboos & Issues' and 'Instant Discussions' are pretty good (although topics often have to be adapted to make them culturally relevant or interesting in china).

but really im looking for structured conversation material, not just activities/games.

the chinese-printed offerings are less than inspiring. the 'NEC New English Course Listening & Speaking' series printed by tsinghua university press is childish and hollow: "Talk about your holidays. Now talk about your hobbies."

also, 'Challenge To Speak' series is badly produced, with inefficient tasks and some disappointingly outdated dialogues.

then the 'Oral Workshop' series - 'argument', 'discussion', ... - which isn't too too bad.

what do you think?

[kev7161]

I think for an Oral English class you can pick up pretty much any textbook to give you pointers, conversation starters, topics, and perhaps different strategies. However, a halfway decent teacher should be able to use that book as a reference point and then come up with games, skits, and all sorts of activities for the students in order for them to practice their spoken English. In an oral English class, it's not the teacher's job to teach them grammar and what-not, but to give the students a chance to practice what they are learning in their Chinese English class. As a matter of fact, it could be a good idea to get one of THOSE textbooks and create lessons and activities around whatever they're studying at the moment.

So, all of us will have opinions and advice on what constitutes a good "Spoken English" textbook, but getting them to actually speak is the main goal and challenge.

[wulfrun]

[Lorean]

Use the thickest book you can find; you will want something to bang against your head when you fully comprehend the futility of trying to make your students to speak.



In all seriousness, I haven't run across a good 'oral' English/Chinese/Japanese textbook. This might be because spoken fluency has little to do with reading books. I am not even convinced it's possible to learn oral fluency speaking with non-fluent speakers (classmates). Oral books masquerading as grammar and vocabulary 'supplements' don't help either....

[patsy]

Maybe you can try this iteslj.org/questions

They have many questions on different topics. It's worked pretty good for every oral class I've taught. I usually let them discuss the questions in small groups and then go around and talk with them. It does seem to get them thinking a bit.

[wulfrun]

[arioch36]

Well, I can help you with finding a really bad textbook

[profM]

From my experience with a thousand students or so from four very good universities in different Eastern China provinces, north and south, around 80% of entering university freshmen need to be channeled into an English program for "false beginners." A false beginners course is standard practice in successful academic and corporate ESL programs all over the world. Whether the entering or contracted students have previously studied for one or two years or seven or eight years, IF their speech is observably deficient (four or five on the IELTS speech dimensions), they need to start learning English all over again from the beginning, but with a good emphasis on speech this time.

In middle school and high school, the majority of Chinese students concentrate on passing their college entrance exams, and it might even involve a loss of face for some to be thought of as having wasted time practicing speech. The English teachers also focus on getting them to pass their entrance exams, which do not require a speech component. Except for the English lovers, the girls that watch all the discs of Friends and the other shows over and over and copy the speech and are great, and a few guys that have a dream, the vast majority of entering freshmen Chinese cannot speak fluently and have limited pronunciation of any vocabulary besides the most basic.

They need an integrated course using all four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking that reviews all the grammatical structures starting with "to be" -- that is, a false beginners course. There are plenty of excellent books, particularly the Longman series, but they are expensive.

It would be perfect if the Chinese and foreign teacher taught the course as a team, with the foreign teacher emphasizing the oral exercises and discussions, which present the grammatical structures under focus in a serial, developmental way, with sequenced vocabulary. The readings in such books demonstrate the application of the focus grammatical structures, so too the listening. The writing and speaking are in the form of exercises and more open expressive language use. This type of program works for making progress with students that have deficient speech skills.

The students need to be tracked into levels as freshmen, though, and not herded by major class designation. China is not doing this in the public universities and it has been wasting its time and its money for the most part on the friendly, creative, interesting foreign teachers that can hardly ever get more than a couple of deficient students to move ahead much with their speech, while the small handful of English-loving good speakers do most of the talking in front of the group or get bored.

The reason the false beginner classes are necessary and have great textbooks with teacher's books as an added resource, is because the dysfluency that is especially real for Chinese students, even more than Latinos and Europeans because Chinese produce "hesitant" speech since they have little practice applying correct grammar in speech and they themselves have a long tradition of insistence on correctness. So, "communicative" English and relaxed requirements for good grammar or even fair grammar is very ineffective on Chinese students. They must review the grammar from the beginning with an emphasis on exercises and discussions that call on them to use the series of grammatical structures in oral activities --NOT just chatting about topics. NOT. This just locks them into their deficiencies, operationally, psychologically and academically.

Sorry. The system's gotta change or you just gotta cope, like everyone has been trying to do. I'm amazed that the ministry of higher education has refused this kind of input from experts over the past decade, but I think they have been sold a bad bill of goods from, "humanist," "communicative" English proponents, which is good as a tactic in some exercises or situations, but is no substitute for an overall teaching strategy adapted to the realities of the habituated deficiencies of the Chinese university freshmen classes.

[wulfrun]

[wulfrun]

anyone with a good link to this sort of commentary on the chinese english-teaching system, id appreciate.

this forum is full of great information, and it'd be worth collecting it together in an organised reference resource. the messageboard format means info cant easily be retrieved, so you get people asking the same questions again.

[mike w]

Text book - oral English!! Sounds like an oxymoron.

I haven't found any textbook yet that can teach the art of conversation.

Text book, yes, for learning grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure etc.

But the only tool to improve their oral / conversational skills is practice. There is no substitution or shortcut.

[profM]

Sorry, I don't know where to find an earlier discussion of this topic, but I know there have been several and the search machine at Dave's is not its best feature. Thanks for getting into this though. It has been my greatest concern in China in the area of education.

Mike, you're quite right; practice is essential. But, most college freshmen need the majority of their practice channeling them to the correct production of the basic grammatical structures of English when they enter college, and later, a focusing on the intermediate structures. By correct production, I don't mean that the teacher necessarily has to correct every mistake, but the whole class is supposed to be focused on a target structure and get practice using it well in exercises, along with more conversational speech that also keeps them focused on a grammatical lesson plus some target vocabulary.

Good textbooks (I'm not sure of the Longman publisher's name for their great series that goes from beginner to Cambridge proficiency levels) have exercises to practice target structures, along with discussion topics that are tailored to continue the production of the target structure, whether the structure under study is past tense, frequency adverbs, different applications of the future tense, modal auxiliaries, etc.

The point is that Chinese college students need to get practice producing each of the different grammatical structures which form the foundation of fluent speech in a developmental sequence, one by one, with reviews after several of the structures have been practiced. As false beginners, the first course in such a series does not actually have to teach the grammar because most of them have already studied that, and in fact their tests always include multiple choice grammar questions. The early classes in this kind of course just review the different target structures in a sequential series in order to have the student practice producing the structure in sentences, and also practice connecting sentences to communicate points and support points.

Students with higher confidence that they can produce good sentences can speak more fluently. Good sentences depend on practice using basic grammatical structures, above all. Then, intermediate grammatical structures will be learned to help the student sound more developed, but the key is to learn them in sequential order and to practice them, and internalize them.

This has to begin from the very beginning, practicing the use of "to be" in the affirmative, negative and interrogative forms of the present tense, using a text book which has a reading passage that focuses on the target structural forms, and which has exercises demanding the production of those forms in writing and speech, along with listening exercises focusing on those forms, some writing calling for the use of the target forms, and then some conversation from the textbook that calls forth the production of those forms. The four different language skills serve to reinforce the learning of the crucial forms that are required to become confident, fluent speakers. There is no substitute for this except perhaps to live in the foreign culture 24/7. Teachers can also add other material if they want, but the key is to use a professionally developed textbook.

[wulfrun]

[arioch36]

Wulfrun

[profM]

If the different English teachers during the same semester aren't going to use the same well-developed textbook that covers the four skills, I think it would be very helpful for the foreign teacher to at least let the Chinese English teacher's textbook determine the focus vocabulary for the oral English classes. I know that means that the FT has to adapt her or his topics and that may cramp his creativity, but college students in China have a huge course load, sometimes twice as much as in a U.S. school. I think it would be very helpful if the students had the chance to reinforce the vocabulary through speech activities with the FT that they had studied that week with the Chinese teacher.