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JISHOU, HUNAN — Along with rains and peach blossoms, April here brings another spring event, the undergraduate English speaking contests.
As I did last year, I have served as a judge for several college contests, including my own college’s, and will of course judge the university finals next month. It’s a task I both enjoy and dread, because quite frankly it’s not that easy to be a judge for these things.
Case in point: my college had nearly a dozen sophomores participate in our competition, from which we judges had to choose two to represent the College of International Exchange next month. The criteria include the usual for public speaking — content, argument, stage presence, eye contact, inflection, diction — but also pronunciation, intonation and grammar. After all, these students are speaking a foreign language.
We found six who we judged as competitive, but could not narrow them down to two. Some had good public speaking skills, but their spoken English was lacking in some ways. Meanwhile, those who had very good spoken English lacked some public speaking skills.
What a headache!
The university, and the provincial and national contests, all include a three-minute prepared speech, a question-answer session, then a two-minute impromptu speech. Last year, there were questions on the impromptu, also, but I hear that section might be eliminated.
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[Cross-posted at The Daily Kos]
JISHOU, HUNAN — Anyone who teaches English as a Second Language in China sooner or later gets called on to give private lessons or classes, or to put it another way, to get sucked into the maelstrom of English-learning angst here.
Some of your students might be university students trying for high scores on their postgraduate exams (the Chinese equivalent of the GRE), which include a pretty tough section on English skills, or the two main qualification exams for foreign study, TOEFL and IELTS.
But, by far most of your potential students will be middle school students (and their parents) who want high scores on the college entrance examination, and primary school students whose upwardly mobile parents want them to get into a good middle school.
[In China, primary schools are like US elementary schools, and middle schools have two levels, lower and upper, corresponding roughly to US middle and high schools.]
Many of these same children will also be taking piano, violin, dance, art, kung fu and/or taiji lessons besides. If all this over-scheduling sounds familiar to you, perhaps you know some parents in the States with similar agendas for their kids. It’s a wonder the children have a chance to breathe.
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Cross-posted from The Daily Kos.
JISHOU, HUNAN, CHINA — Today while I was watching a girl with the English name Jackie teach some vocabulary this morning, I could tell she would be a successful person in the future. The thought just popped into my head unbidden, so I hope it’s a good sign. I don’t know Jackie all that well. She’s a freshman. Since I see my students only two hours a week, that means I have had only about 24 hours of contact time with Jackie and most of her classmates. Furthermore, since I teach her class composition and not spoken English, we rarely even talk to each other in class.
Still, I can get a general idea of Jackie’s character and personality. She works hard, but is not especially gifted at English. She smiles a lot, is friendly, and pays attention in class. I reckon she cares a lot about people. Today, she came to class prepared with three vocabulary words to teach class (a weekly assignment for everyone): dusk, eminent and scenic. And she taught the lesson exactly as I had requested, which not many of her peers have been able to do so far.
Further, she was poised and confident, despite her shaky pronunciation and lack of sufficient eye contact (she avoided looking at my side of the room!). Not a perfect presentation, but acceptable under the circumstances.
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[Cross-posted at The Daily Kos.]
JISHOU, HUNAN — The fall term is coming to a close here. I gave my exams this week, and will spend the next two weeks reading and marking them, so I can return home to see my offspring with a clear conscience.
Before exams, I decided to give my students — and me — a break, and show them a movie. Of course, it had to have some educational value.
Believe it or not, Christmas, at least among our students, is a big thing here in China. They learn about the holiday as part of their English lessons in middle school, but still have only a hazy idea of what it is all about. Chinese textbook authors condense Christmas traditions from the USA, Europe and the UK into a mishmosh of ideas that serve only to confuse, not inform.
Students ask me about how we celebrate Christmas in the USA, and I give them a pretty generic description, based on my own memories of 50-odd previous Christmases. But descriptions, particularly for ESL students, do not really convey the spirit of the holiday. So, I chose A Christmas Carol as the movie I would show all my classes.
Though I did not tell my students, reading or watching A Christmas Carol is one of my own personal Christmas traditions. Frankly, I am a sap for this story. No matter how many times I read the novella or see a movie version, I never tire of it.
This is a preview of ESL students meet Dickens’ Christmas, yearn for travel . Read the full post (1323 words, 1 image, estimated 5:18 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
[Cross-posted at The Daily Kos, and rescued from diary oblivion. That's 3 for 3!]
JISHOU, HUNAN, CHINA — Friday, my sophomores in oral English were more animated than I’ve seen them in ages. It was a set of posters that livened them up.
To preface this diary, I need to explain that our classrooms here are barebones dull: white painted walls, beige tile floors, fluorescent tube lighting, wooden desks and chairs bolted to the floor, and a single double-wide chalkboard. We at least have ample natural lighting from the windows along the exterior wall.
And no heat, but that’s for another diary. [It was at least warmer today than yesterday's high of 6° C (about 43° F).]
In September I decided that staring at the mostly bare walls was getting boring, so I decided to spend a little money and order some posters from the USA off the Internet. (I won’t link to the site here, but the site’s name is no exaggeration. They have ALL kinds of POSTERS.) I ordered four at first, one for each class of sophomores, as the freshmen had not started classes yet.
Three were decently sized, but I failed to read the description of one carefully and ended up with a tiny little poster of Mount Rainier. Very pretty, but not exactly awe inspiring. Since class Z1 of sophomore Oral English meets on Fridays, they were the unlucky recipients of the miniature Mount Rainier. The other classes had claimed the larger posters.
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I am now a writer for the Teachers’ Lounge at The Daily Kos. My first Teachers’ Lounge diary went up yesterday, and was even rescued overnight! In DKos-atopia, that’s a singular honor. So, go read it.
Permanent link to this post (37 words, 1 image, estimated 9 secs reading time) Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Hard to believe that the semester is nearly over, but it’s true. Time passes too quickly.
It also means that I have been in Jishou for three entire months. While it may be hard to believe, it’s become home for me. I still struggle with being absolutely illiterate in Chinese and being incapable of having even a simple conversation in Chinese, but I learn new bits of Chinese each day. So, I figure I’m making progress.
Chief on everyone’s mind now are finals, and for the seniors, postgraduate exams. Anxiety levels are high, and we all are busier than usual. Of course, the students are more anxious than the faculty.
This weekend, I need to write six exams to turn into the office. Each writing or reading class has to sit for a two-hour exam. Oral class students need to be tested individually, and I have 35 sophomores, so I’ll be occupied with them for the next several days.
Fortunately, I have had some experience writing exams, and I have been giving the students in-class assignments for a few weeks now to gauge how long they will need to complete the tasks. They naturally want the tests to be easy. We’ll see. We’ll see …
The seniors are the ones most stressed. China has national exams in several subjects for students to qualify for a bachelor’s degree, and thus postgraduate (graduate school, in US-talk) studies. They all have to pass the national English test. Those planning postgrad work overseas also have to score acceptably well on the IELTS or TOEFL English tests.
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