Buckland Weekly #12: Differences in Chinese and Western Techniques Part 2

So, time for the second in the series about differences in approach between Chinese English teaching and western English teaching. In the last post I listed some differences that I have noted either in observations or in conversations with colleagues and looked at a couple of questions relating to vocabulary acquisition. Before I go on to the next couple of questions, I want to be clear that you as a a foreign teacher aren't expected to use the same methods that the Chinese teachers use. Partly, this is because they wouldn't need to hire you to do that, but mainly it's because you are here to teach oral English. Of course vocabulary and grammar will crop up in your lessons – it's inevitable – but primarily your job is to coax spoken English from the students and to improve their communication skills. This requires a completely different approach to the simple learning of grammar rules and word lists.

So what are the questions I'll look at today? The two propositions are.

Reading aloud is a useful tool in learning a language.

And

Rote memorisation of text passages is a useful tool in learning a language.

Lets look at the first one. Is reading aloud really all that useful?

Apart from a brief Summer school, my first job as a full time teacher was in South Birmingham College where I was teaching refugees and asylum seekers. It was very different to my job here in China. I hadn't been working there all that long when I had the dreaded “observed lesson”. Now personally, as I've said before, I actually quite like observed lessons – providing the observer is competent – because I find the feedback useful. In this lesson I had a class of about a dozen adults from various countries. They were quite a high level and as part of the lesson I had a passage which we read out loud, around the class, with each student taking about a paragraph. We followed it with some comprehension checking and some discussions and I felt that the lesson had gone well. For the most part the observer agreed with me. Then he asked me what had been the purpose of reading aloud. In educational terms, what had been achieved by that particular exercise. I said it had practised their reading comprehension and their spoken pronunciation. He disagreed. Their reading comprehension, he said, would have been better tested by silent reading. Pronunciation when reading aloud also, he said, bears little relation to pronunciation in natural, unforced speech. He went on to add a couple more points. In the task one student was reading at a time and the others listening and following but if the reader made mistakes then it would become harder for the listeners to understand. And, finally, reading aloud is not a normal task. If you become a newsreader it's a skill you need but for most people reading aloud is restricted to bedtime stories for the kids.

On reflection, it was hard to disagree with him.

Now I'm not saying that reading aloud is never a good idea. Sometimes, especially in my junior classes, I will have a couple of students read a dialogue aloud while others follow a printed copy, but I always keep the dialogues short and simple, choose students I know are confident, and sometimes re-read the dialogue aloud myself afterwards. The purpose of doing this is to encourage the others to follow the printed text because I know that if I just hand them out and say “read this” half the class won't bother. Having to follow while it's read aloud focusses their attention. It would be just as effective, perhaps more effective, to get a friend to record the dialogue and then play it in class. You don't always have the opportunity to do that whereas you do always have students. The real message here is that if you use reading aloud in class, use it sparingly and always, as with everything in your plan, ask yourself the question “Why am I doing this? What is it for?”

The related question is whether the rote memorisation of texts is useful. Useful or not it is extremely common over here. If you spend any time in the office you will often see groups of students gathered around one of their teachers reciting, either individually or in unison, long passages from their text books that they have had to learn for homework.

Last summer I taught a group of Chinese teachers from Chengdu. They were all English teachers and all very competent. One of the things I had to show them was the difference between Western and Chinese techniques. I started by describing what I'd seen in Chinese classrooms and asking if they taught that way and if they thought it was effective. The answer to both questions was, "Yes."

Then I did this. I wrote on the board

“Guten Nachmittag. Jetzt werden wir ein bisschen Deutsch lernen. Spricht jemand hier schon Deutsch? Nein? Dann, fangen wir an.” *

and explained that I was going to teach them a little German.

Without explaining what it meant, I drilled them in the pronunciation for a few minutes until they could recite it. They all got it fairly quickly.

Then I asked them what it meant.

Obviously no-one could answer because I hadn't told them.

“That”, I said, “Is what you are doing when you simply ask students to learn and recite a passage. It isn't teaching them to understand English or use it, just to repeat without comprehension.”

They all agreed that the technique was flawed, though whether any of them changed their own teaching practice, I couldn't say.

And that's the problem with the read (or listen), learn, recite approach. It's a good way to teach a parrot but not so good with people.

In the next post, I'll look at some slightly more vexing questions – whether punishing mistakes is effective and what should be done with students who refuse to participate.

(*Apologies to German speakers if I made any mistakes in that, I am a bit rusty.)