You'll never believe these 8 incredible signs your Chinese teacher isn't very good

[daveonhols]

Number two blew my mind!

Really hate that and not even very uncommon!

[Meng Lelan]

I understand this thread is getting popular but I don't understand what we expect to do with the complaints and criticisms we are bringing up about poor teaching. So, what should be our outcome? A set of expectations of good teaching or what...?

[hedwards]

@Meng Lelan, I think the point is that if the teacher is doing those things that it's probably best to either have a word with them or look for another teacher. For people that aren't professional language teachers, it can be hard to know what is and isn't reasonable instructional technique until you've been in class a few weeks and can gauge the progress.

[Meng Lelan]

But roddy left before a word with the teacher. I'm sorry but I don't find that helpful. I will say tysond had a good response. 

[hedwards]

That's true, but it's poor form to interrupt somebody's lesson with unsolicited advise. I once had a student with antegade amnesia and I was spoon feeding him information like #2 over and over. Well, I would have been had it been a language topic rather than a math topic.

 

What's more whether or not the observation is generally representative of the teacher's abilities, it doesn't necessarily mean that the advice is going to be appreciated. It would have been admirable of him to raise the standards, I'm not sure it would have done anything other than set the teacher in his ways.

[xuefang]

@Meng Lelan, this topic is also a good reminder for all of us who want to become Chinese teachers to avoid these pitfalls.

[self-taught-mba]

Great to see great progress has been made since this. -not

[snailssnooze123]

My teacher's approach to each chater: 1)Read every vocab word and example sentence aloud 2) Read the dialogue aloud 3) Answer the grammar practice 4)For homework do the exercises in the workbook and read the answers aloud at the next lesson 5) Repeat!  From my experience, this is how most teachers in China work, and considering that the Chinese educational system is very textbook focused I can understand why they teach this way.

 

To be perfectly fair, I haven't told her how useless her teaching style is to me, and at this point since I'm leaving China in a couple of weeks I feel like it's a moot point. I'm hoping that when I find my next teacher in the US I can avoid all this by making my objectives known from the beginning. So in addition to listing all of the ineffective teaching strategies people have faced while trying to learn Chinese, maybe we could also share some teaching methods that have helped us? I had a wonderful teacher in Taiwan (only for one term unfortunately), and I truly felt that every single class I learned something valuable. Here are some of the things she did for us:

 

- Vocab: To practice vocabulary, she would describe the word or make a sentence that would use the word, then we would guess the vocabulary word she was thinking of. This not only got me thinking about the words in Chinese (as opposed to just the English translation), but also gave me a lot of context for how they could be used. She also printed all of the vocab for each lesson on cards and had us do the same guess-the-word activity in partners.

 

- Speaking: When teaching vocabulary or grammar, she would often take a break from talking to write around 5 questions on the board that had to do with the lesson and then have us ask/answer them with a partner while she went around the room and listened/corrected us. For example, if we were doing vocabulary on landforms, the questions might be "What kind of landforms are there in your home country?" or "Do you prefer the mountains or the seaside? Why?" Even though this was a group class, I still feel like I got a lot of speaking practice, and the fact that it was with another student instead of the teacher took a lot of pressure off of me.

 

- Grammar/Sentence Patterns: Most Chinese books I've used emphasize vocab over grammar. The teacher not only spent half the class discussing how grammar (when to use it, when not to use it, how it's different from what we learned perviously) but also made extra grammar worksheets for us. This extra practice was tremendously useful to me, and I've never had another teacher do that.

 

- Writing: Every one or two chapters we would have to write and give a presentation. We would have to use a certain number of words from the vocabulary we had learned and she would specify particular grammar structures that had to be included as well. This helped me solidify what I learned. A lot of times I can understand a sentence structure when I read it in the text, but actually utilizing it took me a whole different level of comprehension.

[hedwards]

@snails saying something probably wouldn't help things for you and may or may not result in any changes being made. I gave up on getting Chinese lessons as the lessons amounted to going through the book and not much else. It got really frustrating being told to spend more time studying when I was already filling my entire day with study. And having the teacher not ask me questions, even when she should have known I could understand and answer was also quite frustrating.

 

By the end I got rather vocal about the fact that finishing the book just to finish the book wasn't a useful goal if I couldn't use what I was learning. And she tried to claim that I was wanting to learn to read and write. Even if that was true, that wouldn't be even the slightest bit realistic in a class that I was in for less than a month whereas I could have and should have been quite a bit further along the road with speaking and listening.

[snailssnooze123]

@hedwards, I agree at this point it's too late to say something to my teacher. But I was thinking that when I move back home and begin looking for teachers, it would be good to have a solid idea of how I would like to be taught so I can tell my teacher how I want my lessons to me structured. I feel your frustration, after 3 years in Asia and 7 teachers I still feel that only that one particular teacher was actually qualified to teach Chinese to foreigners and I frequently feel like I get more out of my language exchanges and self-studying than the class I'm paying good money for.

 

One thing I found interesting about that teacher I mentioned was that she ran her class more like an ESL teacher than a Chinese teacher. She spoke in the target language 100% of the time, made sure that at least half of the class included speaking time for the students, and even brought in pictures and realia on occasion (like when we were learning vocab for mail, she brought in a Chinese envelope and explained how to fill it out- very useful!). There was still a lot of homework, tests, and outside studying required, but in general the actual teaching reminded me of how I ran my English classes.

 

When I moved back to China, I was disappointed to find one of my new teachers claimed to have spent 7 years in univeristy learning to teach Chinese (I guess he had a Master's?), but his teaching relied heavily on going around the room and asking students to translate his sentences from English to Chinese. If anyone on this forum has completed a degree in Teaching Chinese to Foreigners, I'd be interested to hear about what you learned. Were there any practical classes on how to conduct a lesson, evaluate students, and give formative feedback? Or was it basically just an intensive Chinese degree?

[hedwards]

I think that has to do with the fact that the Chinese education system is still insufficient for the need. They need probably twice as many schools and twice as many teachers at those schools to get down to a reasonable class size. I would expect it to take generations to resolve that.

 

I think what we saw was the normal bias that teachers have in favor of the techniques that worked for them. Since they were taught out of books and told to work harder and not necessarily smarter when things got tough, they tend to give the advice that they were given. That's a fairly standard problem.

 

It wasn't really that long ago that the norm in the US was something that was relatively similar. Lots of book learning and emphasis on grammar with little or no attention paid to actual use of the language.

[roddy]

Anyone who wants a bit more depth on this (and a somewhat more serious tone) should look at practical language teaching handbooks. All the stuff I'm pointing out comes from a four-week full-time EFL teaching course (the RSA one?) I did something like a decade and a half ago, plus from a few years of experience teaching and various patches of being someone or other's student. 

 

I think (it was a long time ago) this was what we used during that course, although I can't remember what came from the book and what came from the trainer, who was very good. There are almost certainly more up to date books. The vast majority of the content should be very easily transferable to other language contexts. 

 

Teaching is very interesting, and I miss it sometimes. 

[xuefang]

If anyone on this forum has completed a degree in Teaching Chinese to Foreigners, I'd be interested to hear about what you learned. Were there any practical classes on how to conduct a lesson, evaluate students, and give formative feedback? Or was it basically just an intensive Chinese degree?

 

I did my bachelor degree in Chinese language with a specialization to teaching Chinese (Sun Yat-Sen University), which means I had teaching Chinese as a second language courses during my last two years. This is a degree for foreigners only, which might be different than the major for the Chinese students. (I will continue to masters where 80% of the students will be Chinese.)

 

In my opinion our courses were mostly very good. We had losts of opportunities to voice our own opinions on teaching and create our own lesson plans and classroom activities for example. We got the theory from our teachers, but the best pratical points were learned in group discussion and group presentations. One of the best courses was 教育心理学 education psychology where we had an amazing teacher.

 

The undergrad was much more than an intensive Chinese degree, but this of course varies through universities and my guess is that with out foreign group (class size 4 to 15) the teaching was much different than it is with Chinese students (class size even 100+).

[roddy]

Added three more to the first post! 

 

Has anyone had much success teaching their teacher to teach?

[abcdefg]

Has anyone had much success teaching their teacher to teach?

 

A significant breakthrough (one-to-one class) was when I convinced my teacher to give me a hint when I drew a blank instead of just supplying the whole answer.

[imron]

9) They can't count to 5

[Gharial]

T: Where I come from summer is very dry. What's the opposite of dry?

S: Cold?

T: No, dry means there isn't much rain.

S: Ah, wet!

 

If you want to know what's wrong with much so-called Communicative Language Teaching, look no further than guffy methodology like this, that makes a meal of easy things yet glosses over the hard - as if 'Where I come from' (as opposed to say simple prepositional phrases quite possibly using previously established information e.g. I'm from Arizona.....In Arizona...) quite chimes with someone not knowing the(~this "extended" or "additional") meaning of 'dry' (and for those lacking basic vocab, the easisest solution is to buy and consult a good dictionary). And a genuinely communicative teacher wouldn't or shouldn't put up so many checkpoints (more like roadblocks, in terms of gaining familiarity with authentic discourse) to understanding: Where I come from > In Arizona, (the) summer is very dry - it doesn't rain for months! Get rid of that stifling, always-hogging-it explicit "teacher" voice. It should be at least partly up to the student to zero in on what is truly difficult, and a more authentic approach will allow and help them to develop that skill. Yet most "communicatively trained" teachers prefer to switch off their brains, let their mouths run on drivelly autopilot with "concept-checking" and the like (not that I believe that too much of this type goes on beyond training or observation, thank goodness), and thus keep up only a pretence of actually teaching anything of real import.

 

So the point of this post is, try to find yourself a teacher who can actually think and talk like an intelligent, normal human being (while of course having planned well but very surreptitiously), rather than like an ELT robot following the dictats of mere surface-level, look-busy programming.

 

 

4) Teacher talking time

 

There shouldn't be so much of it. Explanations and instructions should be clear and concise. Yes, listening to a native speaker is valuable, but that's why BLCU invented the cassette tape.

 

That surely depends on whether the teacher is the primary or indeed sole source of communcative interaction in the foreign language (as is the case when one is still just studying in one's home country), or if the student is immersed in the actual foreign country/'target language community' (with many linguistic opportunities beyond the classroom). It seems counterproductive to me to gag the teacher in either but especially the former context, and when this is in conjunction with inauthentic, unimaginative, even potentially mindless methodology (as in arguably the concept-check of 'dry' above).

[hedwards]

That's a bit of a mischaracterization of the approach. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making a meal out of easy to teach things like that. Glossing over more complicated language constructs is essential to learning to master the language. I wasn't born using the subjunctive in English. Nor did I use the word whom when I was a young child. And I didn't really start using the passive voice extensively until after I spent all that time reading mystery novels. Those were things that I learned after I learned how to make my basic point. And good language teachers realize that students need to communicate first and foremost. I know I'm probably going to get chewed out by other language teachers here, but perfect is the enemy of finished. Students need to have the best possible skills, but considering that natives are imperfect, I'll take a student that's communicating imperfectly over one that's not willing to open his or her mouth every day of the week and Sunday.

 

You're right that a teacher wouldn't put so many check points in, but you're wrong in suggesting that the teacher would constantly be doing that. Constant check points are not communicative teaching, communicative teaching has more active listening than it does active correction. The sample that you're quoting is something that native speakers do with each other all the time when they aren't clear what the speaker intends to say and there are multiple possibilities.

[Gharial]

Hi Hedwards.To be sure, I painted with somewhat broad brush strokes, but that was just to help get the party going some more. I'd agree that grammar often has to be glossed over or approached in a roundabout and/or recyclic fashion (some things are very hard to explicitly teach as discrete let alone at-all "incremental" items). I'm still not convinced about making meals or vague examples though. I mean, what possible reason is there for a teacher to say "Where I come from" rather than "In Arizona (which as you know is where I'm from)..."? The impersonal stranger's Mysterious Approach of the former has something of a "That's fighting talk where I come from!" about it to me. What has the teacher been doing with the class time prior to this, or should we agree that this is simply meant to be just another so-so, off-the-top-of-the-head trainery demonstration of "approved" but actually quite decontextualized CLT practice? And I really wouldn't class "What's the opposite of 'dry'?" as an example that similar to (native-speaker) 'negotiation of meaning', unless someone's engaged in doing a crossword puzzle or some other sort of actual word game. The phrase and its timing is just too patronizing and in-your-face. Mind you, you're right that this imaginary student will probably learn the meaning of 'dry', even if they learn little about what makes actual conversations tick and really hum. As for mistakes, it's now long been a fashionable truism that we "have to" make them in order to "learn to speak" (versus truly, fluently, unerringly speak?) a language, but I don't think that justifies too much laxness, inattentiveness or devil-may-care in the methodology (or rather, the linguistic selections) that a teacher opts for.

[imron]

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Yes the examples are contrived and not natural. The point Roddy was making though is that you shouldn't ask whether someone understands something, but rather get them to demonstrate that they understand.

Note also that your 'more natural' sentence completely leaves out any sort of feedback for the teacher, which is arguably worse than using contrived examples.