Teaching English in China

Published: 2022-02-07
Updated: 2022-03-22

TeachingEnglish in China or, more precisely, teaching English to adult Chinese students raises two questions:

• What do they really want
• What can I deliver?

In this short series of articles, I will attempt to answer these questions.

Introduction

I often like to tell anecdotes of situations where my students and/or I show certain types of behavior or display certain types of characteristics that are funny in that situation. Looking more closely today I realize that the “situations” have underlying causes and consequences.

 With what I have experienced while teaching in China, I am trying to record as closely as I could remember, the situations in which occasionally strange things happened - they show just how differently we think in different parts of the world and why this has consequences for every aspect of our dealings with one another, on the personal levels as well as on the business and professional levels.

I had taught adults for 25 years and began teaching English at the city college of the small town in southern Germany where we lived before moving to China. At that time, I also held specialized, customized classes and courses at the companies in the area where the employees needed to brush up on their English language skills for business purposes. After a short time, I noticed just how different southern Germans and northern Germans were by their uses of the English language and I learned a lot about my own native language by looking through their eyes and listening through their ears, as it were. Little did I know that it would get even “curiouser and curiouser” (quote by Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) 15 years later when I came to China and would work with Chinese young professionals trying to improve their English and German language skills.

Something that all of my clients told me early on was that they had actually all learned English in school and at university in China. Yet, now they found that they were unsatisfied with the results of their usage and so this was my challenge; taking what they had learned and helping them to apply it to allow them to be able to speak and communicate what they wanted. It made me start to think about why this was such a problem for them, since they knew more grammar rules than I even knew existed, and even knew all the exceptions to the rules. They had studied and memorized oodles of words and knew how to spell perfectly, but they couldn’t speak correctly. “Oh dear, I thought to myself”, how do I go about this, because this was the same problem for all of my Chinese clients.

I had to use my experience from teaching English usage to Bavarians and I would, as always up until now, let them give me the contents they needed or wanted to concentrate on and I would help with sentence structure, or grammar or vocabulary, where ever it was lacking. My approach was something none of my Chinese students had ever experienced. Not because I am the only teacher who works like this, but because of things I had not come across before. It was their culture, their language culture that was influencing their learning and use in their jobs.

From what I know about the Chinese language, it being made up of syllables, not letters and words, like western languages are, makes it a high-context language and can cause difficulties in ways I could not imagine.

The following explanation is part of an article about written Chinese from Wikipedia at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

This means that whenever you want to describe or explain something you must set the context, establish the relationship between all the parts you are talking about. This requires putting the syllables together so that the meaning becomes clear. The reason for this, from my limited knowledge of the use of the Chinese language, is that the spoken language is not unambiguous. As an example, the 2 syllables, liu and ping, for me mean the individual “words” - six and bottle. However, if my friend’s name is Liu Ping, obviously her name does not translate to Six Bottles. The clarity comes only when the “word” or “object” is written in characters and as in my example, the characters for Liu and Ping separately look different from when they are together, hence the need for context.

Oh dear, oh dear, how am I going to bridge this enormous gorge in “language canyon”?

For comprehensive information and the history of the development of the Chinese and other character-based languages in Asia, refer to the main Wikipedia article at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

Very quickly did I realize that along with asking my students to provide the content of what they wanted or needed to learn, I would have to provide different methods of teaching to what they had grown up with. That meant no more memorization, but lots of reading and especially speaking on topics they knew from their daily work, spontaneously, without the opportunity of “preparing ahead of time”, as they knew from school. Writing would be important too so they could see what they were thinking in words, using chronology and logic and hopefully then seeing where the mistakes in the structure showed up. However, this was still not enough. I needed to supply self-study materials that they could access whenever they had time or the need to and above all, I had to train them to become confident in the use of what they had already learned.

This was becoming a task on a political, social and individual level like I had never experienced before. True, Bavarians have a very particular type of personality, and I had found from working with them that learning vocabulary and grammar and sentence structure, as they had at school, did not make perfect English use. Yet my Bavarian students at least had the same western background as I, had the same language structure, the same language logic as all western languages have. My Chinese students would have to learn to think completely differently so that they could communicate what they meant in the very foreign language.

And so, after seeing that all my students had the same problem I soon had a suitable method in place which I could use for teaching English, as well as German and it was successful for the majority of my clients, as they told me and from what I could see and hear myself.

And since this is not about me, or my teaching, I will introduce my students and their very unique, Asian characters and characteristics one by one:

1. My first example is about teaching small groups of professionals, identifying the most important challenges and how to handle them.

By Helen A. Stoemmer