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[Dalian Veteran]

It seems that whatever country you are in, education tends to be traditional. And in teaching language, there is still not enough emphasis on the speaking and listening, including in my university in the United States.

In my university's Chinese language department, there are no real opportunities to improve one's speaking and listening abilities beyond the intermediate level. Even in a Chinese conversation class, our teacher from Sichuan is traditional and gives us written quizzes on the new vocabulary words, and then takes an entire hour to explain the new words and the dialogues (sort like how I used to teach the SBS books in my first year in China, before I learned that wasn't the way to do it).

You can make friends with Chinese students in the U.S., but once again, friendships happen naturally, rather than bugging someone just because they are Chinese. As foreigners in China, I'm sure you all dealt with locals who bug you and want to be "friends" with you just to practice their English. Here in the U.S.A., you are no longer special in the eyes of Chinese students, because there are "foreigners" everywhere. The Chinese students in the U.S. are also extremely busy. They are very studious and represent the cream of the crop as far as studying is concerned. If you want to practice your Chinese with them, you can pay them as your tutor or do the same old "I teach you English, you teach me Chinese" arrangement.

The graduate degree program here is focused on either literature and linguistics, neither of which I'm interested in. I just want to speak good Chinese, be able to read the newspaper, and maybe even be able to negotiate business deals. That's all I want. I should study at a good university in Beijing, but getting my wife a U.S. green card and being able to get financial aid through the American university system all ruled out the option of continuing my education in China. In China, there's no grants or student loans for foreign students, plus I didn't feel safe before my wife got her green card and with myself not being able to have any kind of permanent or semi-permanent residency rights in China. Plus, in America, I can get higher paying part-time jobs as opposed to teaching English in China.

In the end, it is through my wife, my tutor, and the watching of Chinese DVDs that I am able to maintain my Chinese language proficiency here in the States. Not through my classes. Probably next year I'm going to apply for the MBA program and just drop this MA in Chinese altogether.

[struelle]

Good post, and it makes me realize how fortunate I am to be immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment to pick it up.

Students who learn English in China don't have such an environment. While good teachers can create an English environment in class, they don't have abundant opportunities to practice outside of class. So hats off to the upper-intermediate and advanced students out there who manage to keep up their English in these circumstances!

As long as I'm here I want to max out all opportunities to practice Chinese. If I come back to Canada I can still do it, but the environment will be more limited. I remember back in summer I wanted to practice with my cousin, but we both sounded like idiots in front of our families.

Steve

[Roger]

Good and sympathetic posts, yes, but premised erroneously on the acquiring of "speaking skills". I am grateful to any school that doesn't foist on me the job of holding "spoken English" or "oral English" or "conversation" classes.

For anyone to use a language orally, they must be intellectually up to that task, and they must have sufficient charisma to enthrall other listeners. These main ingredients are not present in Chinese students, and these deficiencies alone are more powerful inhibitors than the absence of organised speaking classes.
I have often said that formal conversation classes are a waste of precious time. If you have anything important to say, or if you are sufficiently self-assured you do speak, no matter what your linguistic limitations.

I find that China has gone the wrong way in adopting an ideal dear, I suspect, to American educationalists. I have often drawn flak from American colleagues who lectured me that speaking makes people fluent and competent in the target language. Not true at all in my opinion.

Look around the world, and learn from others who have had to acquire foreign tongues, and you will not fail to see that the majority of students the world over don't have the special benefit of oral lessons.
So, why do these people succeed, or at least, why do they succeed much better than the Chinese do? Before you say the script used to write that language may be the same, or the language may be related to English look at Africans, Indians, Arabs, Russians, Greeks.

I think our students hail from a culture in which the individual has no legitimate place because he or she must integrate with the group or society at large. Look how they learn in class: chorussing, chorussing, chorussing, never a single student saying anything individually! That's mind-blowing and stultifying, not to mention boring!

Their teachers are too concerned with their own "face", so they never, or seldom, use English even where it would be more useful than Chinese. In other countries, the teacher always gives instructions in the target language: "Ouvrez vos cahiers, commence a ecrire..." "Macht die BUecher auf, Seite 44..." Not so our CHinese colleagues!

I have here before me a book on "intercultural management in China", and even Japanese - with so much in common with Chinese - are appalled at the top-down approaches of their Chinese JV partners, and their overemphasis on theoretical knowledge at the expense of practical skills.

What do our students think English is?
Yes - a kind of "knowledge". To me, it's a skill.

Sorry, the less they talk, and the more they read, the better for them and for me!
Why not literature? A very disappiointing attitude!
Can our charges talk about America without ever having read anything about the USA in the target lingo???

[arioch36]

Don't know any leading American educator who espouses oral skills only. Perhaps you could share which book, method, or leading educator from America you are referring to?

Personally I am much infavour of the intregated approach, if you want such labels. Oral, reading, writing together. This is the "ideal" of most American schools I know. So I would be interested in who you are referring to. Not SUNY Albany, Columbia, Indiana (sorry, the three I know of for sure) Not the ideal of any TESOL MA program I know of.

[arioch36]

[laodeng]

I am saddled with oral English classes, which, if there were a catalog, might be appropriately listed as Mandatory Spoken English for the Manifestly Unwilling. I was not too amazed to find that for many of these third-year university students (all non-English majors), I was the first native speaker they had ever spoken with. Never having been particularly theory-bound, I simply started by telling them where and how to approach waiguoren, what to talk about, what not to talk about, and how to terminate a conversation. After a little role-playing, I have been sending them out weekly to interview foreigners--not difficult in Shanghai. I also debrief them on a weekly basis. Although I've had a couple students thrown out of Starbuck's for supposedly annoying the patrons (this occasioning another little lecture in social skills), overall I fancy that I see progress.

[eion_padraig]

Laodeng,

if I find out that one of your students is coming up to annoy me in Shanghai, I promise I will find out where you teach and sic them on you!

I must protest a bit about the inability of speaking English being the reason why my Chinese students are not self-assured and interesting to speak with. My Chinese skills have improved immensely in the last 20 months (from nothing to quite a bit), but even before when I lacked the vocabulary and now when I don't have it, I find a way to talk around it (circumlucation (?, sp?)). My Chinese students almost never even try to do this with their thoughts or ideas. I've also begun speaking to the weaker students in Chinese outside of class (otherwise they just don't respod) and I've found these discussions to be extremely uninteresting. This is also a place where the underlying culture doesn't value individual thoughts much and presently (and even more in the past) "wrong" thoughts can get you in trouble.

Eion

[laodeng]

I've advised them to avoid people who glower, but, if one finds the courage to try to initiate a conversation with you, please don't discourage him! Seriously, I don't enjoy the conversations I initiate out of the classroom with the slower students, but I do it anyway. The cross I bear . . .

Cheers!

[struelle]

With regards to the oral English lessons, I wrote an earlier post based on Stephen Krashen's language theory but I suspect it got deleted. Are the mods here really biased against Krashen? If so, why?

To sum it up, oral English can be an intellectually demanding task for both teacher and learner given all the factors involved: motivation, classroom management, group/pair work, language level, comprehensible input, learner styles, fluency vs. accuracy activities, and many more.

I've got no problem with teaching oral classes as such, but the way they are set up (administration) in this country is what's difficult. As well, managers and Chinese teachers have very limited knowledge of modern language theory and how to apply that in an oral class. So it's common to hear things like, "Just make them talk" or "Get them interested in your class" while they don't mention any of the mechanics above.

Jeremy Harmer does a good job of summing up motivation, which you can read in his book, "The Practice of English Language Teaching."

Steve

[Redfivestandingby]

I believe "Oral classes" are misguided in principle. It's impossible to get a group of 20 students talking for two hours three times a week for three months. Invariably, it's the same two or three students who always talk leaving the rest of the students angry simply because they don't have the courage to speak up. Of course, they blame the teacher without realizing it is their behaviour which keeps them from participating.

I've had lots of students with very good English clam up in class. Outside of the classroom they tend to open up a bit and I'm surprised by the types of questions they ask: "how do you say 'hello' to a foreigner" and "how can I make friends with foreigners?". Which leads me to believe that this "social shyness" or "cross-cultural retardation/ignorance" influences class conduct up to some extent.

[arioch36]

I'll admit, I cheat a bit in my oral classes. They do writing. If there was anything to read in this library, they would read to.

[cimarch]

I have to agree with Arioch, if you just wait for hands you'll get the same 3 or 4 students answering everything, every class. You have to single people out, my personal favourite is picking on the ones trying to hide or do homework. When we do debates I try to organise a series and assign each student to a team so they all know they HAVE to make a speech. Sure it's painful for the first while, they mumble, stare at their books, don't know the answer etc. But I find if you gently guide them through it they very quickly realise that it ISN'T so difficult and they CAN do it. Plus the fact that they HATE being embarrassed in front of the class really makes them try to avoid it in future. It can be very difficult to get around to every student in a big class (some of mine have up to 60 students) but you can get each one to speak at least once every second lesson. Games and rewards go a long way to getting them to participate. Also, I refuse to accept "I'm sorry I can't" as an excuse, in one of my classes their former (obviously lazy or weak-willed) teacher had and it was all I heard for the first couple of lessons. Once they realised I wasn't going to let them simply sit down again they started coming up with answers suprisingly quickly.

Oh, and the words 'English Corner' make me shudder every time I hear them.