China

This afternoon, I had an interesting experience. First, a little background.

In addition to my teaching for Berlitz, I also do some work for Auralog, another company that actually contracts for my services through Berlitz. The Auralog lessons are different, though, from the Berlitz ones in several ways. First, they are designed only as practice supplements for an online learning program, to help students practice spoken English. Each lesson has a topic and some materials to go with it, but the main purpose of the lesson is for the students to have lots of speaking time to discuss the topic. The lesson lasts 40 minutes, but students can come in and go out at any time during that interval. Also, they don't have to sign up for the lesson in advance but can't simply drop in if they want to. In each lesson there are generally two teachers: one who leads the discussion, and the other who simply listens in the background, ready to jump in if the first one either doesn't show up or is unable to conduct the lesson due to technical problems. Both teachers are paid the same.

So, that's the background for this story. This afternoon I was scheduled to be the back-up teacher for an Auralog lesson, and the topic was "The Chinese Boom". The first-slot teacher (who is in the U.S. or Canada, I believe) did show up and encountered no technical problems, so all I did was sit and listen to the lesson.

It was fascinating! About 4 or 5 students showed up, and ALL of them were in China! Most were fairly advanced students, but they all had to struggle just a bit to find the words they wanted to say. One question in the materials asked whether the Chinese boom was a positive thing for the world. Naturally, all the students felt that it was (and I suspect even most people from other countries would also agree), but each was also able to defend this position with good reasons. Another question was about whether Chinese would become the dominant 2nd language taught in schools around the world. Most students doubted that this would happen, including one who admitted that she WISHED that it would! The consensus seemed to be, though, that Chinese would be too difficult for most non-Chinese people because its words are so different from those in most other languages. One or two of them did note, however, that many foreigners in China for business are, in fact, learning some Chinese.

The materials for the lesson were clearly not really designed with Chinese students in mind, but the discussion was really very interesting, and I felt quite privileged just to be able to listen to it and to hear the opinions of real people from China on this subject.