Teaching More Like a Chinese Teacher

This semester I’m planning on teaching more like a Chinese teacher. What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, I don’t mean Chinese as opposed to western. I mean Chinese as opposed to myself. I could probably just as accurately state that I’m planning on teaching more like one of my school teachers in the US. I’ll break this down into a few categories.

My primary goal in doing this is to teach and act in a manner to which students are more accustomed and to assess what differences, if any, this makes in my students’ learning.

First class: I typically spend about forty-five minutes on getting-to-know-me stuff: pictures, questions and answers, even little games. This semester I’m spending about fifteen minutes on this and then diving into the first lesson. The Chinese language teachers I have had and other teachers I know in China tend to dive straight into the course material without doing anything more than introducing their own name. This is true of many western teachers too, but EFL programs instruct teachers to spend more time on introductions since coming across as a human instead of an alien (in both senses of the word) is of importance in a cross-cultural situation. I actually completely agree with this, but my goal is to come across more as a serious teacher in my students’ minds, like the teachers my students are already used to, even if it’s going to be an alien one.

Lesson structure: More classwork directly with the text; less classwork doing non-text related activities. I have a shelf filled with teacher resource books full of fun learning activities, but I’m going to refrain from using them unless the activity relates directly to the text. I used to try and do one fun activity per class, often unrelated to the text (but still related to English learning, of course) to keep students from becoming bored. Essentially, I’m going to worry less about students getting bored this semester. Chinese teachers’ classes are supposed to be dull and fact filled while foreign teachers’ classes are supposed to be fun and fluffy. I have definitely been playing to this notion in my teaching. The fact is, however, learning a foreign language often is quite boring, no matter where your teacher is from.

Test-focused: My students are going to do better than anyone else’s students on the CET4 at the end of the semester, period. That’s what they are really concerned about anyway; they are not really concered about being able to actually use the language for communications purposes. Although I completely disagree with this as a goal for learning a foreign language (or anything else), enlarging their vocabulary and improving reading comprehension and writing skills for a test isn’t going to hurt their communicative abilities either, and besides, they can do with improvement in all areas.

Names: I’m not doing English names for my students this term. It’s going to be all Chinese. I used to do English names, not for my sake, but to try and simulate an English-speaking environment for my students. Since I’m not focusing on communicative skills this term I’m not fussing with the confusion English names inevitably presents me with when communicating with the English department and other teachers about a particular student.

Tags Teaching, China, EFL, TEFL, Education

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