The Monkey Kings 美猴王

I just had my first English corner. English corner at Web means you, the foreign teacher, are holding an hour long seminar. I see it as a great way to get experience in holding a meeting and speaking in front of a group.

I don’t know how successful it was. It is often difficult to tell just what Chinese people are thinking, because so many of them hold their emotions–happy, sad, angry or ecstatic–inside. If I were in Germany or Italy I’d probably know exactly what most of them thought; but most Chinese people don’t want you to think they disapprove of you.

Anyway, my subject was American comedy and I analysed an episode of Seinfeld with them. The show is based on everyday subjects, familiar things; characters that drive the plot, and not the other way round; relationships; common things made funny; repeating words until they become funny. The reason I don’t know if it was successful or not is that there wasn’t a lot of participation and my students didn’t get a lot of the jokes. But they appreciated a lot of the humour when they understood it, and they learned about what makes American comedy funny, so I hit my goal.

The Monkey Kings have been in Shanghai getting training from our employer, Web International. It seems like a good school with a solid business model, which could explain its relative success and fast growth. We learned all about how the school works, how to teach better and what is expected of us.

We each taught small classes. The key to teaching these classes is that you, the teacher, limit your presence. That means as little talking as possible. Most teachers want to lecture and some just talk to hear themselves talk. “Flip open those beginner textbooks, turn to the page on compound nouns and knock yourselves out.” But we are teaching conversation. You don’t lecture conversation into someone. So your job is to get them talking to each other, using the language that is the goal of the lesson.

And then you need to strike a balance between accuracy and fluency. Accuracy means getting it right. You can correct people when they make a mistake, but is that really how they learn? There is a part of the class where you should correct them. How do you correct them? You learn by thinking about what you are trying to say. Therefore, if you stop people and tell them, they won’t learn, they’ll just parrot you. Instead, stop them and say the same thing back to them. “We went to shopping.” “We went to shopping?” “Um, we went shopping!” But don’t worry too much about errors, because fluency is more important in language learning–speaking fast rather than speaking properly. As long as you can make yourself understood, you are communicating. So most of the class you want to focus on letting them speak to each other, asking each other questions and even correcting each other if they think about it.

Little talking from the teacher means maximum from the students. Making them think about their mistakes makes them remember them. And giving them the goals of the class and then sitting back helps their fluency. Sounds easy, right? We’ll see how well we do.