Conversations and Communication

It starts with a note from my advisor: “Assignment #3 Conversations and communication - Talking about your topic - in Chinese!  DUE MAY 15 - please be on time, I will be leaving town May 19! (as usual I will remain in email contact, but my response to this assignment has to be done by then.  Your final paper will be due June 30.”

The details of the assignment are as follows:

--Restate the central problem/s of your research in one or two initial paragraphs

My project is concerned with opportunities and experience in the field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).  Not only is this subject popular in English speaking countries like the United States but it is also extremely popular in The People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Chinese are remarkably interested in English and will do anything to learn.  I have spent many hours explaining idioms and phrases whose meaning may be just outside of their grasp.  I have also noticed that the people I have met in Xi’an are not only fantastically excited they are accommodating as well.

While it may be easy to find a job here though, it is a lot less easy to discover personal motivations.  For example with my first job, I initially felt less than adequate, even though I was assured that effort and punctuality were all that was required of me.  My lack of faith was fulfilled a week and a half later when Liu called and changed all of our agreements.  I was right, I am a terrible teacher and I should just quit.  Instead I stuck it out and I feel I have been rewarded with some great experiences.  I also have decided that this was not the whole story.  I think that Liu hired me because I was the second choice to another teacher who wasn’t coming through for him.  When he told me, “You don’t use the same style the students are used to.” He actually meant that I should quit and give all of my hours over to this other teacher instead of just the half that he took from me.

No matter how well I hide my motivations I am transparent in the eyes of my friends and family.  Understanding motivations can be like second nature to me when I am at home but it is definitely not the same here. I think that there is a correlation between culture shock and relative advantage.  With the above scenario it is obvious that Liu got the best deal because of the fact that I still know nothing about how he operates.  The fact that I have only met him twice is a testament to this.

--Update me on what work you have been conducting, noting new insights and new problems.

There is a responsibility attached to being a teacher.  A teacher is constantly exposed to discontinuous relationships.  It isn’t a job it is a lifestyle.  In the past two and a half months I have had two jobs, which have gained me a number of new friends.  For instance the kids that follow me home after class are great for finding out more information about teaching learning and working.  I have gained a lot of experience from teaching little children as well.  In fact, they all teach me a great deal—even the quietest students. I have the option of maintaining a relationship with these people after my jobs are over.  Shared interest is the mechanism maintaining a relationship and I think that it is important understand that this is a very important aspect of my own motivations for teaching English.

I have also acquired new English learning and teaching skills as well.  Liu told me that my teaching style is different and I would tend to believe him even though he may not have ever seen me teach and I haven’t a clue why it is different.  I have always leaned toward two styles of teaching though: CLT and the Rassias method.  When I first learned about CLT (Content Learning Technique) it immediately caught my enthusiasm because I have never had much interest in a strict curriculum.  Content Learning is best suited for tutorials like my classes and I think I have had a lot of success.  In one of my lessons I found that this could be done through breaking the class up into groups.  I had the first set of groups build a town on paper and the second group learned about it.  At the end of class we listed the towns and all of their attributes.  At the beginning the language knowledge in the classroom is heterogeneous.  All the students know words but they all don’t know the same words.  The role of the teacher is to teach the students how to communicate so as to make the pockets of unknowns available to a greater audience or homogenize language ability.  This is teaching learning.  If the student learns how to learn then the teacher is no longer needed.

The Rassias method is a little different.  This method is very attractive to me but I think that it will be a long time before I can even begin to use it in my classes.  An English teacher at Dartmouth, Rassias developed a method that was focused upon dramatically raising a student’s language acquisition.  This means more activity in class.  Rassias himself insists that the student should respond at least sixty times an hour—this means practically one response per student per minute.  This extra-ordinary achievement is currently outside of my ability but the meaning is clear: response is important and necessary.

--Make use of the improvements in your language capacity by including data from conversations/interviews in Chinese.

I am interested in teaching English.  Hence would it not make sense then to only speak English so that I may meet people who are interested in learning it?  When I meet people on the street speak to me in English I speak to them in Chinese because this is the language that I am studying.  This is really disconcerting to them.  Unfortunately, this is a good way to get them to go away usually.  I think that this is a major conflict of interest.  Remedying this problem has been a lot of work.  It requires that I not only pay attention to the interests shared with my students or potential students but the interests shared with you (my teacher Mary).

When I first arrived my language ability was poor but as time went on I discovered that I comprehended more of what was said.  I don’t know if this has a lot to do with the vocabulary I have learned though.  I think that it is place.  I have discovered the right places for speaking and I know the vocabulary required for comprehensible output.  While I may have learned a many language skills in the past two and a half months I think I have learned a lot more about where to meet new friends and make new relationships.  I was with a Chinese friend when I met the person who made my current job with little children available.  I was at English corner when I met the closer friends that I have now.  In fact, the majority of my Chinese friends are studying English.

The greatest reason for me knowing how to get around here has to do with my ability to speak English.  People know I speak English and are willing to give me stuff for it.  They just want a bit of my time.  I hate to admit it but I don’t mind this either.  Speaking Chinese can be extremely frustrating.  It takes a lot to keep myself from hiding away in the dorm like others might.  My teachers use English to explain things to the students in my class even.  It is entirely impossible to escape this.  ‘Escape’ is hardly the right word for it my situation would be nearly unbearable if I could not speak any English at all.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t learned any Chinese.  I am constantly aware of what is being remembered because of the fact that every day I am able to solve a new problem in my everyday life.  ‘Wang qian zou,’ a phrase I learned the other day, would have the perfect phrase to say to a cabbie that took a wrong turn on me a week ago.  ‘Pa shan’ which means climb a mountain, is a term I discovered the other day at Hua Shan.  Another thing I have discovered is that cab drivers always ask the same three to five questions, the same three to five questions that I generally am asked upon first meeting someone who cannot speak English.

--How do they feel about the nature, uses etc of your topic?

There are a number of different motivations for learning English and not all of them are associated with the desire to leave the country.  Generally speaking English is an extremely lucrative language.  People want to learn it because of the fact that so many popular products and important information can be better understood through its usage.  I have a couple businessmen in one of my classes and I even had a high school student or two.  Most of the students in my classes are involved in either industry or economics both of which have strong ties to the English language.  Actually, I would have a harder time thinking of something that is not strongly associated with English.

Of course there are a few students who really are interested in leaving the country though. One of my friends is planning on going to school in the US and she already has several friends who are in other countries.  While learning English is worthwhile for a student in China it is also extremely useful for students returning as well.  Almost every student in the country is supposed to learn English prior to College and all of these English teachers are Chinese themselves.  There are even national competitions in English in every province.

--Build a sketch of the total universe of how this topic plays a role in their lives.

English represents a great advantage, which says a lot about how it is perceived here in China. Aside from the fact that every student is already somewhat interested in English there is also a great demand for it in industry.  It is very obvious that the country is working hard to compete with western markets.  I have never seen so many buildings being built at the same time.  Xi’an is bustling with construction and from what I have heard from my other teachers this is not the only city in China that is doing so.  The automobile is a wonderful example of imported language.  Recently, I took a trip to southern Shaanxi, I didn’t know it at the time but the line that I took there was built only within the past ten years.  All of these things require help from other countries and if this is the case it means English.

--What kinds of special vocabulary you have had to develop to talk about your project?

--What words and concepts did you have to look up in the dictionary when you anticipated the opportunity to talk to someone about it?

Di’er yuyan xide (second language acquisition) is a term that I learned in the US but I didn’t know that the Chinese had translated it.  Along with content learning there are a number of other techniques for learning language that they teach at Humboldt; L2 acquisition is one of them.  Acquisition is an important term because it deals with the aspects of language that are generally overlooked.  Usually when a person learns language they pick up the majority of their vocabulary quite easily.  Linguistic researchers call this acquisition because the words themselves are never actually learned.  Rather the language learner hears the words and phrases co-opts them into their own language and them spits them out at later date.  If the usage is improper then it is discovered by a ‘native speaker and corrected, this is called learning.   Apparently the characters for ‘Xide’ are ancient to the point where the word is not used any more, meaning ‘acquire’ in the more conventional sense but I didn’t know this until one of my students told me this in conversation only the other day. 

--What sorts of special vocabulary have you picked up in conversation about your topic?

Crazy English (Feng1 Kuang2 Ying1 Yu3) is a very typical term here and is even the name of a very famous magazine.  I think I first heard this term in relation to Korean and they call it ‘K’richi yingyish’.  Crazy English refers to the fact terrible English is used everywhere.  The magazine’s author is a Chinese person who was interested in having an effect upon language change—which is most pronounced where languages meet each other.  I have noticed that Xi’an is filled with this stuff.  Almost every other store front in the downtown area has English written on it and about half is terrible and the other half while grammatical would never be said by any native speaker.

The concept of "native terms" means using words in a emotional or special way; packing in the meaning in a certain context (a different way of thinking about things).

I suppose I could call my friend Zeng Sa a black horse (heima) and the reason I say this is because of the fact that her English is incredible.

--What sorts of special metaphors or ways of talking about something occur in your topic?

I have a German friend who asked me if the rumors were true that I was interested in teaching English.  I found out that he wanted my help correcting a document he needed to hand in to his boss at Siemens.  The document he showed me is so typical of Chinese writing that I don’t even notice it any more.  Even though it is a German company, Siemens still needs to advertise its products in English.  He was given a document written by a Chinese person that he was supposed to correct.  It was a pitch for rail switches sold by Siemens’ joint venture partner and though it was well written it contained the type of vague flowery Chinese prose that is so typical of China.  I corrected the mistakes for him and even straightened out the language in such a way so as to leave the flowers intact.  He thanked me and then said that I might even be able to get a Job.

Zeng sent me a series of e-mails that had many emotional undertones in it and I found that her language became more flowery the more she expressed feeling.

--Describe ways to be friendly, establish rapport, explain what you are doing and why you are asking questions.

In my classes I have discovered that my students want to talk continuously, this is why design my lesson plans in a more student-oriented fashion.

--How do you express cultural ignorance, transposing what people say into your own words for confirmation and correction, and ways to encourage people to talk more, or with greater depth?

Because it is such a natural aspect of the human psyche, I have discovered that my ignorance can have both a negative as well as positive effect upon my situation and the fact that I am so stubborn doesn’t make this any better.   I went to visit a friend’s parents in Ankang and when we were eating I made a few mistakes.  I feel I have turned down a number of people in the interest of time only to discover that it may have been worthwhile to have actually spoken to them.  I met an African man a while ago and he made it clear that yes one could spend literally a whole year (or four in his case) without learning any language.  This is called fossilization.

--What are strategies for dealing with obstacles?

Obstacles come in such a diversity of situations that the only thing I can say for sure as a good strategy is patience.

--Are there questions you simply cannot express in the way you are thinking of them? Are you surprised by any of the responses?

I think that probably the most interesting set of responses is why people want to learn English.  This seems to be a hard question to look into because of the whole emigration issue.

This is series is a retrospective of my life taken from emails that I sent or received on the First of the Month.