Language and Power: Critical Practice in ELT in the Chinese Classroom
Ka Hang Wong, Australia
Ka Hang Wong is an English language teacher in Australia who has taught in China as a foreign teacher at a public university in 2014. He has a BA in International Studies from Murdoch University, Western Australia and a Graduate Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He is currently working towards a Graduate Diploma in TESOL at UTS. E-mail: a_k_wong@hotmail.com
Menu
Introduction
The context
Issues of Language and Power
Assumed superiority of native-speaking teachers and western teaching approaches
Sociocultural incongruity of tasks assigned by native-speaking teachers
Banning or limiting of L1 in the Oral English classroom
The concept of ‘critical’
Translanguaging: An innovative response to Language and Power
Implications and conclusion
References
Since the beginning of economic reforms and opening up of China to foreign investment in the 1980s, the English language has become increasingly important to everyone young and old. English is now a compulsory foreign language subject for all school children up to the second year of university. Because of China’s move towards globalisation, the focus of English teaching has shifted from the traditional learning of grammar and vocabulary to oral English in recent years (Liu 2010, p.90). There are now thousands of English language schools everywhere. Well-off families would send their young children to extra-curricular English classes after school, and university students and young workers would go to these language schools for pronunciation training and oral English. Many English language schools offer test preparation courses for high school and university students who are preparing to go overseas to study. Universities, English language schools and more affluent public schools now employ native-speaking teachers from English speaking countries to teach speaking skills. That being said, China has a love-hate relationship with the English language, on the one hand appreciating that her economic rise is dependent it; on the other seeing the English language as a threat to cultural purity (Middle Kingdom Life 2013). In addition, the uncritical application of the communicative approach has often resulted in tensions and conflicts between native-speaking teachers and Chinese students (Liu 2010).
Drawing on critical theories, this paper seeks to outline innovative responses to issues of language and power in the context of native-speaking teachers teaching English in Chinese universities. The paper concludes by discussing some implications on teaching Chinese students.
The context which I am going to describe is the Oral English subject at a public university in a second-tier city in China, where I taught for two semesters in 2014. The students were in their freshman year of university and aged around 18 to 20. They were required to enrol in the subject lasting 2 hours a week for 16 weeks. They were studying various majors including English, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Financial Management and Construction Management. Unlike Australian universities, students attended their classes with students from the same major and each major consisted of about 60 students. Most of the students had an advanced level of English as they’ve had at least ten years of 2-3 hour per week English lessons in an EFL setting, but they were not used to western teaching approaches.
English lessons during secondary school years are notoriously teacher-centred, heavily focussed on grammar, geared towards examinations and generally taught using Chinese as the medium of instruction (Ji 2012; Li 1999; Liu 2010; Penner 1995). In other words, English lessons are more about studying the technicalities of the language and less about using the language to communicate. Teachers teach from a text book and talk most of the time (Penner 1995, p.4). From my observation, this traditional approach has created a phenomenon of students being afraid or reluctant to speak English in front of others. For many, attending an Oral English class at university would be the first time they would encounter a native-speaking teacher from an English speaking country.
In the following section I will discuss three issues of language and power that I have identified within the above context. These issues are first, an assumed superiority of native-speaking teachers and their western teaching approaches; second, the sociocultural incongruity of tasks assigned by native-speaking teachers; and third, the banning or limiting of L1 in the Oral English classroom.
In China, native-speaking teachers are largely hired from English speaking countries to facilitate speaking activities. They usually come from US, UK, Canada and Australia. They mostly use teaching approaches that are student-centred such as the communicative approach. It is generally assumed in many East Asian societies that native-speaking teachers have a better command of English than local teachers and that the models of teaching imported from western contexts are superior (Lin 2012). However, Chinese students often complain that they learn nothing from their native-speaking teachers, although they think Oral English classes are a time for them to relax and kill time (Li 1999). These complaints are often due to the communicative approach being in contradiction of the traditional methods that Chinese students are attuned to, resulting in resistance of the students to western teaching pedagogies (Li 1999; Lin 2012; Liu 2010; Penner 1995).
The belief that native speakers are better at teaching the English language has been resonated at an official level. In the case of Hong Kong, having been separated from its Chinese mother land and colonised by Britain for 156 years, deep-seated views of the superiority of native speakers and their western teaching methods still exist even in post-colonial days. In the post-colonial era, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has implemented a native-speaking English teacher (NET) scheme in public schools (Education Bureau 2015). Although NETs and their western teaching methods are yielded authority in Hong Kong’s schools, the effect of such hegemony is the cultural invasion of Hong Kong’s classrooms by western teachers (Lin 2012, p.72).
Because of this view of native speakerism, foreign cultural and pedagogical models are often directly imported into the Chinese context without any adaptation to the local culture. A 2009 study by Liu and Wang (cited in Liu 2010, p.93) observed two native-speaking teachers from America teaching oral English to university students in China with context which were unfamiliar to Chinese students. One example of this was a discussion of recreational vehicles. The study authors observed that students were not discussing in English when placed into groups. Instead they discussed the topic with each other in Chinese. The study found that although the teachers knew that the students had poor vocabulary and little knowledge of the United States, they made no attempt to adapt their teaching to the Chinese context. They believed the communicative approach to teaching ESL in their home countries was also applicable to China.
A similar study by Luk in 2005 (cited in Lin 2012, p.73) also found that native-speaking English teachers in Hong Kong directly imported their teaching methods and context without having any regard to the host country’s culture. In that study, students were asked by a NET to perform an information gap activity called ‘finding grandma’s false teeth’. The NET didn’t take into account that most Hong Kong students did not live with their Grandma and even when they did, Grandma’s false teeth were not an object to play a practical joke on. The activity frustrated the students to no ends because they didn’t find any meaning or purpose to the activity.
Native-speaking teachers routinely discourage the use of L1 in the Oral English classroom. One of the major reasons for this is that they believe students should make the most of their opportunity to practise English in the limited Oral English classes they have each week (Paterson 2007). The use of L1 has also ‘traditionally been anathema’ in the foreign language classroom because it is in conflict with the communicative approach (Walkinshaw and Duongthi 2014, p.7). I once told a native-speaking teacher from the UK, who is also an IELTS examiner, that I use translation activities to teach my class. We then had a furious debate and he disagreed that I should allow the use of the Chinese language in the classroom because he believed languages should be learned separately to avoid confusion, a theory supported by Cook’s 2001 article (cited in Forman 2010, p.57). As the UK teacher was not a Chinese speaker, I suspect a reason why he banned students from speaking L1 was because of his inability to understand what they would be saying, a point resonated by Paterson (2007). I had allowed the use L1 not only because I believed it was an aid to learning but I did so as an act of resistance and solidarity against the political dimension of global English, a principle advocated by Forman (2010). I believe the Chinese language is the future global language of this century because China is becoming a world superpower and many western students are learning Chinese as a result. When I asked students to write about why they were learning English they typically opened the paragraph with something along the lines of ‘as we all know English is the language of international trade,’ to which I would jokingly reply ‘Who are we? I didn’t know that English is the global language! I thought it was Chinese!’
So what is the concept of ‘critical’ and how is it related to power? There are various definitions of this concept. When I was a student-teacher, I was required to write up a journal and self-reflect on a critical incident during my practicum. A critical incident is an event that is significant to us, a moment that makes us question our beliefs, an experience when we realise that change is needed. Luke states in his 2004 article that ‘to be critical is to be called up for scrutiny’ (cited in Morgan and Ramanathan 2005, p.153). It means that to achieve any effective social change, self-awareness is needed. In pedagogy, it is a process to unlearn our beliefs and what we’ve internalised (Morgan and Ramanathan 2005, p.154). Pennycook (2004) says that at the most basic level, the term may refer to critical thinking skill that universities students are expected to develop – the objective questioning and analysis of issues. The author then asserts that another definition of critical is to make things socially relevant, to make language learning fit in with social context. He states that a third approach to this notion is seeing one’s work as trying to change social inequalities. This approach assumes in being aware of inequality as a step toward liberation. In the world of TESOL and applied linguistics, it is the third version of ‘critical’ that critical discourse analysis, critical pedagogy and critical literacy are based on.
Pennycook (2004) describes a practicum that he observed. It was a team teaching situation where the non-native speaker deferred to the native speaker for judgement regarding grammar and the knowledge of English. The non-native speaker had believed that he was disadvantaged because English was his second language, but he had learned the language well and travelled extensively. It became apparent during the feedback session afterwards that the native speaker suddenly realised that she was the one who was more out of place in a multicultural and multilingual ESL classroom in Australia. It was this critical moment that had power shifted to the non-native speaker.
Luk’s 2005 study (cited in Lin 2012, p.73), as mentioned in the previous section, concludes that using western teaching methods without any integration into the local culture only reflects the ignorance of these so-called ‘foreign specialists’, who are nonetheless accorded authoritative status. Between this uncritical acceptance of an assumed superiority of foreign pedagogical models and reverting to traditional methods, there must be a middle-ground to respond to students’ needs.
In my experience I found that importing the communicative approach into China by native-speaking teachers is only helpful if students are younger learners. When I first arrived in China, I had believed I could teach university students using the communicative approach, with games, role plays and lots of student interactions to practise their skills. Soon I found that the communicative approach advocated in many TESOL courses in the West was not a ‘one size fits all’ solution. It was an ineffective method to teach Chinese university students who were not so enthusiastic with this teaching model. I did, however, find that I was able to apply an ‘English only’ interactive approach successfully with high energy younger learners of upper primary and middle school age whom I taught at an English language school where I worked part-time outside the university. I found that the younger the students are, the more willing they are to accept western teaching approaches without the use of L1. My observation is supported by Li (1999, p.8), who reports that although native-speaking teachers believe the communicative approach would enhance students’ learning, university students in China find it hard to accept this method of teaching. He states that whilst an interactive approach may be suitable for children, Chinese students believe it is not suitable for adults.
I had learned English with the traditional approach before I migrated to Australia at the age of 13 and my own instincts soon kicked in after a false start. Strikingly different to the communicative approach, students taught in the traditional approach regard themselves as empty vessels to be filled and teachers as the fount of knowledge (Liu 2010). Though the communicative and traditional approaches are in direct contrast with each other, I wanted to try out a hybrid of the two in my Oral English classes.
I had initially told the class that they were to speak English only. I had simply followed the dominant view in believing that banning L1 in a language classroom was for the good of the learners. As I found that it was difficult to get students engaged in pair work or group work – not only because they had not been exposed to the communicative approach before they entered university, but also because they found it awkward to speak to each other in English – I had to find other ways to engage them. Under the encouragement of the director of the English language school who I worked for, I soon broke my own ‘English only’ rule.
One way to get around students’ reluctance to engage in pair work or group work was to make use of their L1 in the classroom by exploring translation activities in several ways. An example would be to select a dialogue from a locally published textbook for students to work with each other and translate the conversation from Chinese into English. They would discuss with each other the most appropriate English words and sentence structure to use. Another activity would be to ask pairs of students to create their own role play in Chinese then swap their script with another pair who would perform the conversation in English spontaneously. The activity aimed to develop students’ skills in interpreting. For classes with higher levels of proficiency, I would show students an interesting dialogue with idiomatic expressions each week from a blockbuster movie, The Art of Getting By, a romantic comedy about a boy who is failing at school and falls in love with a classmate. I would show students the movie clip with Chinese subtitles, explain the vocabulary and idiomatic expressions that were said, and compare it to the Chinese translation. By working with a movie clip which related to them each week, I believe this was a good way to learn how native-speakers communicate.
By effectively doing what non-Chinese speaking teachers could not do, I believe I had gained students’ trust, created rapport and expressed solidarity with them. Instead of having an uncritical assumption that English is the dominant world language, I attempted to awake their subconsciousness that Chinese is potentially the future world language and China is the next superpower.
When combined with the communicative approach, learning through translation activities had given students an edge over a directly imported communicative approach, in that students could learn new vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, sentence structure and grammar points in a way which suited them. In a small way, I had hopefully avoided what Lin (2012) calls the ‘cultural invasion’ of the Chinese classroom.
While the use of translation activities certainly had its merits, applying this method also had its disadvantages. The most common downside was that this approach failed to maximise exposure to L2, as the students used a combination of both languages during their pair work translation activities. Another difficulty was that most of the time one could not translate directly from Chinese into English word for word – it would result in a google-like translation if one did that – and it was sometimes extremely difficult to express one’s mind in English properly when translating idiomatic expressions.
In spite of the drawbacks, I found most students strongly favoured the use L1 in the classroom. The translanguaging approach had raised their awareness of the differences between L1 and L2. Several examples illustrate the difference of what a Chinese speaker and an English speaker might say for the same phrase:
Chinese speaker => Going abroad can open our eyes.
English speaker => Going abroad can broaden our horizons.
Chinese speaker => Can I hug your baby?
English speaker => Can I hold your baby?
Chinese speaker => Let’s play together sometime/Let’s have fun together sometime.
English speaker => Let’s hang out together sometime.
Chinese speaker => What are some places to have fun in Mount Lu?
English speaker =>What are some interesting places to see in Mount Lu?
Many native-speaking teachers who went to China felt disappointed after their teaching experience because of a mismatch of expectations between native-speaking teachers and Chinese students (Liu 2010, p.93). Tensions and conflicts happen because of different educational philosophies and cultures and when one believes their language and teaching approaches are more superior to the other. Ting states in a 1987 paper (cited in Penner J, 1995, p.6) that the traditional approach has been influenced by Confucianism; the teacher holds the only authority in the classroom and the student is not to question, interrupt or challenge the teacher. On the other hand, Oatley asserts in a 1984 paper (cited in Penner J, 1995, p.6) that in the communicative approach, the teacher is only a helper who helps students discover for themselves. That being the case, the communicative approach results in many classroom activities which students from a traditional learning background would not be accustomed to. This polar opposite of the two approaches is what frustrates many native-speaking teachers and students in China, each side assuming their method is more superior to the other. The conflict is exacerbated by the traditional approach being conducted in the students’ L1 whereas the use of L1 in the language classroom is abhorrent to proponents of the communicative approach (Walkinshaw and Duongthi 2014, p.7). Culturally relevant teaching is important because it celebrates cultural characteristics, confronts racism and affirms students’ L1 as an aid that helps them learn their L2 (Kubota 2004, p. 26-27), hence native-speaking teachers should adapt their teaching to accommodate the Chinese context and learning styles.
I am convinced that to be a good native-speaking teacher in China one must have an understanding of and a respect for Chinese teaching and learning styles before embarking on their journey. Furthermore, native-speaking teachers should at least have some functional Chinese language skills to make teaching easier and to be able to use some Chinese in the classroom for translation activities. Native-speaking teachers do not need a native or academic level of the Chinese language to teach Oral English in China, but they should at least be able to understand day-to-day communication in spoken and written Chinese. Oral English is about being able to communicate with native-speakers in English in day-to-day scenarios; hence for a native-speaking teacher to be able to make use of translation activities effectively they also need to have an equivalent level of Chinese.
In my own experience, native-speaking teachers are seen as some sort of a celebrity. Students are often curious about life in faraway countries. However this does not mean that it is a time for the native-speaking teacher to impose western pedagogical models onto the host country’s students, but an opportunity to share with each other about their country, culture, values, and most importantly, their personal experience in learning a second language. Being a native-speaking teacher isn’t only about teaching English or helping students pass exams. Chinese students see their teachers as role models in all aspects of life who show love and pastoral care for the students (Li 1999, p.3). The saying ‘to be my teacher for one day is to be my parent for my lifetime’ (Liu 2010, p.91) goes to show the bond that can result from being one’s teacher in the Chinese context. There is an enormous sense of personal satisfaction when a native-speaking teacher is able to be a mentor and bond with his students in cross-cultural friendships that is difficult to explain to someone who has not had that experience. I was deeply touched when my English major classes invited me to a farewell dinner, expressed their appreciation in a book of memories and said they were waiting for me to return to China again. Likewise, I was asked by my Construction Management students to address the freshman and sophomore student body at their Christmas function which was also a send-off for me. These are just some examples of the honour and respect native-speaking teachers can receive. Had I not been willing to engage in critical practice and adapt my approach to the Chinese context, I highly doubt my time in China would be as satisfying as it has been. Indeed, the most difficult time for me was to return home and move on.
Through critical practice in teaching, I believe I had partially increased students’ interests in learning English because some of them had enrolled into courses at the English language school where I worked part-time. Others had decided to study abroad and had begun to prepare for the IELTS exam there. Similarly, I have come to reflect on my own teaching approaches through a critical lens, developed confidence as a teacher and motivational speaker, and above all, changed the way I see the world. Only when native-speaking teachers carry a compromising attitude can they break down cultural barriers, make potentially lifelong cross-cultural friendships with each other and be effective English language instructors.
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