Having Fun All The Time

Well, it happened today — perhaps every language teacher’s worst nightmare.

I was teaching one of my small oral English classes (small meaning about 25 students; see footnote for more details*), and asked them to do some discussion in class. The chapter we were working on focused on a girl who didn’t want to go to school because she was afraid she was going to get made fun of. And the discussion question the book provided was “Why do you think children don’t like to be different from others?” That seemed germane and easy enough to talk about, so I went with it. I carefully asked the students to discuss the question in pairs, taking turns, with three minutes for each person to share her ideas. I stressed that they should speak only in English, not Chinese.

I asked them to begin, and they didn’t do anything. So I asked them to begin again. They looked at each other awkwardly. So I explained it again. And told them to begin. So they began.

Last semester when I assigned discussion I would wander around the room to make sure the students weren’t just playing on their phones or chatting in Chinese. But this semester, thanks to the fact that I split my classes in two to make them more managable (again see note below), I can actually just sort of stand at the head of the classroom and keep an eye on all of them and sort of hear bits of what each pair is saying. Or at least make sure that they’re saying it in English, not Chinese.

But today, as I was standing at the head of the class, I realized that it was fairly quiet in the room, aside from a sort of general mumbling sound that made it impossible to tell what any one person was saying, save for a couple of students who were obviously doing the discussion. So I sort of looked away from them to try to focus on the general sound in the room, which is hard to do in a room of 25 people. And then I realized that I wasn’t actually hearing any English at all. Or Chinese. I was hearing a lot of people “talking”, and when I looked at the class they all appeared to be doing the assignment (i.e. their mouths were moving and they were nodding and making conversation-like facial expressions), but nobody was actually saying anything.

Yeah. If it’s not already obvious, that means that I realized in an instant that most of the students in my class were pretending to talk. They were moving their mouths and nodding their heads in agreement, as though engaged in meaningful discussiong, but they were actually just miming speech, play-acting more-or-less silently with the sole purpose of making me think I had actually given them an assignment worth anything. I tried to inconspicuously focus on a couple of pairs of students and confirmed it…there was definitely no sound coming from their mouths. At all. At least a couple of them. So I asked one student if she was actually saying anything, and her and her partner both cracked up laughing instantly, and I ended the activity immediately. A little shaken, but glad, at least, that I had figured out what was going on.

So then I did what I often end up doing in class, which was to lead the whole group in a discussion by asking each student the question individually, rather than asking them to do the discussion on their own. I was planning to come back together and discuss as a group anyway, but my hope was that by giving them the chance to dicuss one-on-one first, everybody would get a chance to flex their language muscles and get ready to share with the rest of the class. Which didn’t work. Dismal teaching failure number 3,958.

I still haven’t figured out how the hell to use discussion in class and have it work. It is the last and apparently most untouchable speaking practice, as far as I can tell, yet reputedly the most effective, like the Holy Grail of language teaching. But I just can’t make it work. I’m sure if I were teaching classes of four to eight it would work just fine, but in a room of 25, not to mention 50, which is my normal class size, it is just impossible to have a bunch of people talking at once. Everything devolves into chaos and one language learner can’t hear or understand the other. So everybody mimes, just to make the teacher feel better.

If any wayward Internet traveler or reader has any ideas on how to make discussion-en-masse work, I’m all ears. Till then, I think I will try to hone down and specify the discussion assignments even further, and make it more like a “practice what you’re going to say” type activity. Which is I think what all their other English teachers do, anyway. Which is sort of like discussion, right?

On a side note, I am performing tomorrow night in a play entitled (in Chinese) “The Foreigner Is Coming”. You can guess what character I play. I have a few throw-away lines that the audience won’t understand, and one throw-away line in Chinese that they will understand, but mostly I am in the play for my blond hair and freakish height. Oh, and I’m playing “You Are My Sunshine” accoustic with students accompanying me. I can’t remember how I ended up agreeing to do it anymore, but I’m sure I wasn’t in my element, whenever it was. There will be an audience of about 500. Oh, and last night I attempted to sing a rather difficult Chinese song at another school assembly, again with 500 people in attendance, and forgot the words, killed the audience with microphone feedback, and then had a broken microphone for half the song, oh, and also, there was some awkward trying to hold the microphone with my arms full of flowers that the students surprised me by running onstage with during the song, and the choral singers that joined me onstage at the wrong time. Oh yeah, and I can’t sing or dance to begin with. Or speak Chinese. It was awesome.

Let’s hope “The Foreigner Is Coming” goes a little better tomorrow.

*Footnote: Last semester I had four different classes, all about 40 to 50 students in size, with a total of about 14 teaching hours per week. So I was a bit of a stress ball and found teaching that many students mostly hopeless. But this semester I had fewer classes and less class time (only two different classes, both 50 students, for a total of 8 hours per week), so I elected to divide the classes in two and meet with each half once a week, and the whole group once a week, making for a total of 12 class hours each week. As if anybody cares…but the difference between teaching 50 students in one small, hot, sweaty room and teaching 25 students in that same room is the difference between war and peace. And I didn’t know that last semester.

I was just walking home from dinner and I overheard one of the most common forms of greeting in Chinese, only this time it was a little different.

The question, in its full-sentence form, would be, “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

This time, though, it was just “Chi fan le”, which, directly translated, means, “Eaten dinner.” (I’m pretty sure it was a greeting, not a response to above greeting.) Not exactly a question, or a statement, just a few words thrown together which, in context, have an obvious intent.

Lots of Chinese phrases are like this – if you took them out of context, or if you knew only the vocabulary but not the everyday speaking habits, getting along in China would be totally bewildering. Well, more bewildering than it is in the first place, anyway.

So it got me thinking. Speaking hones a language down to its barest elements. It simplifies statements or questions that, when written, become overly structured and laden with grammar, but when spoken, are simple, elegant, bearing only the necessary elements.

One of the first things I realized when I stepped into the classroom here to teach English was that I would have to make a choice between teaching the grammatically correct form of the language or teaching it how it is spoken. For example, when teaching students how to express a desire for me to repeat something – something they often, surprisingly, didn’t know how to say (they had always said it in Chinese to their English teachers, when they had to), I started to think: should I teach them the grammatically correct sentence we would use to express this? – “Could you please repeat that?” or “Could you please say that once more?” – or should I teach them something natural, i.e. something we would actually say in English, like the phrase “Come again?”

The problem is that for most English speakers, these kind of slangy, natural expressions arise from almost nowhere. They’re not something we ever study while we are in school (standard language classes in formal education pretty much exclusively focus on grammar, writing, the formal word, and completely ignore all the brilliant little idiosyncracies of speech, except maybe for linguistics classes in college, I guess) but those idiosyncracies are, in a sense, the heart and soul of a language. They are the way we communicate, the way we express ourselves when we are working with others, sharing ideas, problem solving, arbitrating the problems and solutions of our work, school, and whatever lives, but they are totally (as far as I can tell based on my conscious awareness of them and the active mental catalog I had of them when I came here to teach) ignored.

Let me give you an example of an idioscyntratic phrase that is pretty popular in English, and that you will have heard a bunch of times if you’re a fan of the T.V. show “The Wire”.

The example is this: “That’s on me” or “That’s on him/her”

This is a simple expression that would have absolutely no meaning at all to a Chinese mid-level learner of English. To a native speaker, especially when heard in context, the statement obviously has to do with assigning a person who bears the blame/burden for a particular blunder or responsibility. But for someone who is learning/has learned English, it could only possibly mean that something is “on” someone. Like a ketchup stain or a pouncing dog. More likely, it’s just going to look like a meaningless line: article, preposition, pronoun. Wha?

Let me give you another example. Early on in my time here, when I had already started teaching, some students helped me sign up for the Chinese chat client QQ. As I mentioned in my previous post, QQ is the ubiqitous MSN-messenger-like chat client in China. But also, since this is China, everybody’s handle, or identifying name on the service, is in Chinese. Which means I rarely knew, in the beginning, who was messaging me. So, of course, one of the first time I got a message from someone on QQ (probably a “hello” or a smiley face; those are pretty run-of-the-mill), I responded, quite innocently, “Who is this?”

I remember sitting there for about three minutes with no response from the person. Then, finally, the student sent me her response:

“What do you mean?”

At first, I was astonished. But then, after some thought, it made sense. If you didn’t know about the oral English habit of using the article “this” rather than a more direct statement using a pronoun, i.e., “Who are you?” or “I am (blank)” in conversation, it would be impossible to be certain of the meaning of the sentence “Who is this?” So I was one line into an English conversation with one of my students, and she was already totally baffled. Great.

Over time I have managed to become aware enough of these English idiosyncracies or differences from Chinese-language idiosyncracies to know when one is coming out of my mouth, so that when an entire classroom of students suddenly appears dumbstruck after I have said something relatively simple, I know how to slow down, back up, look at the phrase, write it on the blackboard, explain it, without getting frustrated or confused at why they don’t understand. It’s true, they have very broad vocabularies as language learners (I’m surprised at how often they throw out words like “simultaneous”, “inevitable”, or “identical”), but they haven’t had exposure to the authentic spoken language, the real living breathing, burnished and raw thing – the thing that is so rare in text books and teaching materials – to know what I’m talking about when I say something like “after you”, or “slow down”, or “I’ll get it” or “could you please hand me that pen”, or…. “Who is this?”

Which, in a way, is a shame, because if they had got the chance to put half the energy into learning speech that they have put into learning reading, writing, and vocabulary, they would be pretty damn near fluent, I think.

But for me, it’s interesting to learn these pared-down, gritty sayings that only make sense if you understand context, frequency of use, and how simple language can be when you have to say it.

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“You eat yet?”

Like Tarzan speak, in a way (and I’m grateful to Chinesepod.com for teaching me these kinds of idiomatic speech patterns in Chinese rather than trying to cram grammar down my throat). But it works. And it’s damn beautiful.

Peace out from China.

Well, classes and the semester have started up again, which means that I am again back in front of groups of 50 students at a time, trying to help them figure out the actually pretty difficult language that is English.

Luckily I think I’ve figured out how to teach English a bit better this semester, so the stress level involved with preparing for and teaching classes seems to be way lower now. Part of that has to do with simplifying and streamlining what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, and part of it also has to do with the fact that this semester I just have fewer students.

Part of “simplifying and streamlining” the teaching process, for me, I think, meant just making it more boring (for me, not for the students, I hope). In my first semester I think I spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to create new lesson plans and different ways of teaching. I went all over the place with my lesson plans and activities, trying everything I could think of or find on the internet. In a way, I think that was good because I tried a lot of different things and learned about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. Then again, I also spent a lot of time in-class explaining my new lesson plans to students. I mean a LOT of time. Which I don’t think is a very productive way for them to practice their spoken English. Which was supposed to be what the class was about.

(Just to record it here, some of the things I tried in class included: call-and-response scripts, writing dialogues and performing them, handing out slips of paper with questions on them and timing the students and asking them to ask and answer them in pairs, giving the class disicussion questions and tearing my hair out while the whole class proceeded to sit around and chat in Chinese and play with their cell phones, lecturing on the present perfect and present continuous and past perfect tenses and trying in vain to get the students to practice them, trying to teach them songs and having them tell me that the songs were too fast and too hard to sing, and on top of that not being able to sing the songs myself, attempting to get the students to practice basic conversation by teaching them simple phrases like “how ya doin’?” and “how’s it goin’?” and then realizing that the students already knew these phrases but still couldn’t use them in basic conversation, for reasons unknown, trying to teach the students pronounciation of vowels and then realizing that they had already learned the vowels but pronounced them strangely for reasons that I couldn’t determine at all, and only determined by accident, usually, months later, & etc, &etc. Most of these lessons were relatively painful and stressful, because the students didn’t understand them and I was trying them cold for the first time. & etc.)

So this semester I have significantly pared down what I am trying to do with the hope that if I can simplify things a lot, and focus on helping the students practice a few key skills, like taking basic English sentence structures and creating new sentences creatively, and like retelling stories from our readings using creative twists of the tales — I’m hoping by doing this stuff we’ll be able to make real progress. I’m also using audio recorders this semester to record the students’ speech and play it back to them with critiques of their pronounciation and suggestions recorded by me. So I’m hoping that will help. There’s evidence that it will. When I logged into QQ (China’s MSN-like chat client) the other day, one of my students messaged me and told me that she liked the new class structure — and also that last semester she hadn’t understood my classes, so mostly she had just read the book in class. This is the kind of thing that happens in classrooms here often, I think. They’re so big and so unwieldy, and teachers tend to lecture nonstop with little knowledge of what is going on out among the ranks, that if students don’t like a class, or don’t feel that there’s anything to learn from it, they sleep, or read, or play on their phones. Which I guess isn’t different from the U.S. at all.

More on teaching later. For now I’ve got to run back to my dorm because someone is helping me to fix my internet today (I hope). Hurrah. That means HFATT should come back to life shortly.

Oh, and here’s an awesome first-time kind of basic guide to teaching oral English in China. When I stumbled across it, it was a revelation:

http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/guide-to-teaching-in-china

See you next time.

: )

I have been relatively absent from these pages lately due to a number of factors, including the semester beginning, a former professor of mine from college visiting my base city in China, the Internet in my apartment being broken, and some rather turbulent personal stuff that I probably won’t comment on much.

More posts are forthcoming, but for now, especially since I am writing on a broken keyboard in a loud, fluorescent-lit Internet cafe, I will just have to sign off having assured you that HFATT is not dying, just experiencing a temporary lull.

Hope all is well in the West.

: )