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Learning to speak English in China: An enthusiastic revolution By
Leon D'souza ZIBO, Peoples Republic of China -- I first visited China as a volunteer teacher in 2001. A few friends from Utah State University, which I attend, were headed to Wuhan, one of the largest cities in central China, to teach English there and I decided to tag along. At the very least, I thought the trip would be a welcome break from school, but I also hoped to learn more about the culture and the people of this fast-emerging global power. I had taken a few classes in Chinese government, and the fact that China remained one of the world's last surviving communist bastions intrigued me. I envisioned the 6-month sojourn as a way for me to study the political climate in China. In fact -- and I'll be candid here -- I had even hoped to jumpstart my nascent journalism career by writing what I then believed would be a seminal tome on the changing tide in China. Needless to say, that didn't happen. However, I did end up writing a few essays on life in modern China, which I published in this paper. I returned to China in August after a one-year hiatus. My wife Debra, whom I met on my last visit here, had longed for us to revisit this country as we had both truly enjoyed our first stay. China is special to us for several reasons, especially since we met here even though we had both attended Utah State for almost three years prior. It took China to bring us together. That aside, we both love teaching, and the children here seem eager and enthusiastic to learn. Their parents seem equally anxious that they be able to communicate in what is, for all practical purposes, the global lingua franca, as China prepares to "greet the world in English" at the Olympics in seven years. China's commitment to teaching English to its majority Mandarin-speaking populace is stunning, to say the least. Consider this. CTV Media, the multi-media production arm of China Central Television (CCTV) recently announced a joint venture with Pearson, a London-based media and education giant, to provide education and consumer content across television, broadband services and publishing for 350 million Chinese households with television. As part of the cross media effort, CCTV will provide Pearson-CTV Media with unprecedented distribution across its television network, which reaches more than one billion viewers every day. The alliance will focus on English language training. The Pearson-CTV venture merely scratches the surface of a slew of partnerships in this area -- governmental and independent -- currently underway in cities across China. A striking icon of this revolution is the "foreign teacher." Native speakers, mostly American, Canadian and Australian, hired to teach English in schools, both public and private, are seen in virtually every city. They are paid enormous salaries by local standards and treated quite like royalty. Those desirous of sampling life in China at no cost to their pocket often milk this cash cow for all it's worth. My wife and I are excellent examples. We live in a two-bedroom apartment, equipped with more modern conveniences than you would ever expect in a home outside the developed world. We have an air conditioner, heaters, a computer which connects to the Internet via digital subscriber line (DSL), a washer and dryer, a two-door refrigerator and a water heater so that we can enjoy long, hot showers on tiring days. All this in addition to 3,000 Reminbi Yuan per month, which is siginifcantly more than the average wage in Zibo, the city in northeastern China where we live and work. At the Zibo Foreign Language School we're sort of like celebrities. Everyone, from the kids who giggle and whisper as we walk by, to the adults who laugh heartily as we try, sometimes hopelessly, to make conversation in Mandarin, seems to view us with some degree of fascination. Now, I have to confess, since we both speak only a smattering of Chinese, we honestly can't decipher much of what's being said about us, and we can only hope that it isn't terribly derogatory. However, from the feel of things we are welcome here, as are most foreign teachers. In fact, there is almost a cult of personality surrounding us. Take my class at the middle school this morning, for instance. I was greeted with a chorus of applause, and smiling faces singing, "We welcome you to our school -- to the tune of Happy Birthday -- as I walked into class. Throughout the period, the smiles endured and the claps got louder each time I did something they thought was funny. Enthusiasm like that in one of our own schools in the United States is, without doubt, very hard to come by. I must admit there are days on which I've wondered just how much of a difference I actually make, given that I don't really speak much Chinese, and many of the classes I teach sometimes turn into 55-minute sessions of blank stares and clueless laughter. But I must be doing something for these students because they seem to be grasping a few words here and there, and every now and then they'll amaze me by speaking in perfect sentences that I thought they never quite understood. And the teachers seem to think of us as trained experts, when in fact we're just doing all we can to communicate. That this system, though imperfect, works so well says a lot about the zealousness of these people. They want to learn, and they'll struggle and stare and shake their heads in frustration saying, "Wo Bu Dong (I don't understand), but in the end, almost miraculously, they'll learn. Mr. Ling, one of the local English teachers I work with, learned the language by listening to early morning radio broadcasts from the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America. I can't even begin to imagine how much effort this must have required. When I think of all the Chinese students back at Utah State who make it through our higher education system, where English is the sole medium of instruction, with stellar grades, I sometimes find it hard to believe that they too, at one time, were among those smiling, clueless faces in some foreign teacher's classroom here. How much time and energy they must have expended in getting to where they are now! There is a lesson for us in the Chinese experience. It is a time-tested lesson, one that we need to remind ourselves of continuously: the real secret of success is enthusiasm. It's what the Chinese have in abundance. Sometimes, where English is concerned, I think it's all they have. It is visible, and extremely potent, and it is what keeps them striving. At the rate they're going, I won't be surprised if the world is greeted with a thunderous, reasonably accent-free "Nihao and welcome to China!" when Beijing 2008 rolls around.
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