Dreams of White Tiles . . .

10/13/2004

Not Talking

Filed under: Uncategorized — Roddy @ 8:46 pm

I’ve been taking a few different classes at a private Chinese language school. The idea is to spend a few days sampling different ones till I find something I like.

The school is pretty cheap, and I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular. At their prices, expecting chairs would be pushing it. However, I’d heard good things about the school and figured I’d come across a class I’d like. So far though, I’ve been disappointed.

Of the 8 hours I’ve taken, 6 have been oral Chinese. In these 6 hours, I’d guess I spoke for about 6 minutes, either reading directly from the book or discussing vocabulary, never actually speaking naturally or spontaneously.

When I was teaching, I heard about this kind of the teaching, with the teacher up at the front explaining everything and the students listening, doing some drills once all the vocab has been covered and occassionally offering up the odd sacrificial question. This was bad teaching and good teaching, which we were meant to practice involved much less teacher talking, and much more student talking.

I taught the good way, and did a fairly good job of it, till I got bored of teaching. I’d certainly never been taught the bad way, until taking these classes. And God, it’s dull.

Good and bad are simplifications. It’d be a brave and talented teacher who attempts a full interactive communicative extravaganza with a lecture hall of 80 elementary English learners – though I have no doubt there are many doing so across China. Repeated drilling is more useful that the people who came up with the next load of theory would have you believe.

I guess there’s a number of reasons why the classes are being taught like this. One is that the majority of the students are Korean and Japanese, and all the teachers are Chinese. There’s naturally going to be a tendency towards the educational methods predominant in those countries, which still to a large extent involve teachers talking and students snoozing. Also, it’s a relatively intellectually easy way to teach, and although all the teachers I saw were enthusiastic and seemed to be enjoying their teaching, there didn’t seem to be have much done in the way of teacher training (at least, not beyond ‘explain the vocab, do the drills’).

The rest of the students seemed quite happy with things, and I think that’s the way they like it. I’m going to go back and try a few more classes to see if I can find one that looks better – basically, I just want the opportunity to open my mouth and speak Chinese for a couple of hours and then have someone tell me what I said wrong. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to though find this though, and am starting to think about alternatives.

A note: I said this was the intellectually easy way to teach. It’s not the actual easy way to teach though, as it involves a lot of standing up and talking for the teacher. The easy way to teach is to spend 10 minutes before the class thinking up some implausible situation for the students to act out (Student A: You own a company that wants to build nuclear power plants in Farmville. Student B: You are Student A’s husband, a committed enviromentalist and a Farmville dairy farmer. Discuss), get the students to do this repeatedly with different partners while you sit down and gaze out the window, and then spend the last ten minutes correcting on the whiteboard mistakes you might have heard had you been listening. Former students of mine will find this ‘method’ strangely familar.

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