Teacher Discussion Forums

as an english teacher (native chinese), i'm very interested in any experiences that esl/efl teachers have had in teaching chinese students, good and bad experiences please. I will gladly try to help by sharing my own experinces.
yours precious

Hello Precious

We have not had too many Chinese students in our school. I have had three of them in my class and they were very similar in their attitude to the language, to learning, to peers, and to the teachers.

They have all viewed English as Chinese language translated into English. To start with, it was a great pronlem for them because we teach English through English and ultimately teach students to think in English as well.

Later on they managed to change their learning strategies, mostly as a result of peer-to-peer interaction.

They were all members of the 50 to 80 thousand Chinese population in Hungary who are without exception workaholics. These students were willing to learn two hours a day, in the 25th and 26th hours. The problem here was not with the attitude or with the motivation, but with their life-style and we couldn't help that.

The only solution to this problem was a simple trick: I kept them in the school for another 90 minutes and they had to do everything there and then.

Their general attitude to peers was totally against language acquisition since they couldn't accept working with another student as a useful learning experience and it leads us to their general attitude to the teacher.

They have viewed their teacher as a sort of Mr. Know-All and were not able to accept anything less as useful teaching.

The last two problems have unltimately solved each other. The more they were able to accept their peers as useful sources and learning partners, the wider vatiety of activities were viewed as useful teaching.

Leslie