One very embarrassing situation Chinese students frequently encounter in an English-speaking environment is that they seem unable to express themselves clearly though they always can understand others perfectly. The test system of China has the due responsibility for such a notorious phenomenon known as “mute English”. It is known these days that a typical Chinese student does well in grammar or reading, or as we say, input of information using English, but he or she performs rather poorly when it comes to output, especially speaking and writing. With so many efforts exerted in the reform of English teaching and learning these days, why is there still little substantial change till now? What is in their way to use English as a language of two-way communication? The way English teaching in classroom focuses plays a big role in such a phenomenon. Hence this paper deals with some tentative methods for English teachers in China to create a learner-centered, communicative, and intercultural classroom so that they can make a difference to the situation. Together with this, criticism on some relevant literature will be presented.

A Learner-centered Classroom

Perhaps no other culture in the world compares to the Chinese tradition of honoring a teacher as an unchallengeable figure of authority. Ever since the beginning of the Feudalist Society, or, according to some evidence, even earlier than that, the Chinese has long deemed a classroom a place dominated the one who lectures, who, to the students, is a “father of life-time once a teacher”. Even with the globalization trend reforming many ways in modern education, the high scores in the test as a common goal has helped a lot in maintaining this old tradition where “the learned one speaks”. In some way, it did help students get trained to memorize facts and theories more efficiently in many science subjects like chemistry, mathematics and physics, but as far as English is concerned, we see an obvious pitfall in so doing for that leads to the common picture displayed in many English classes across China: students gradually lose their motivation in participation while they are supposed to be engaged in the process of acquiring communication skills with personal experience, rather than the ability to conduct a one-way intake of so-called “knowledge”.

That’s how we are now hearing a widespread cry for the termination to the tradition of the teacher-centered classroom and instead, more and more seasoned and thoughtful educators have started to advocate a learner-centered classroom where we see an exchange of roles between the students and the teachers, at least from time to time. Here are some recent interpretations of this trend in various forms:

1) Learners’ needs, styles, and goal driving the development of techniques

2) Some control of the class yielded to the students as they conduct group work or team projects

3) Flexible syllabus in which students’ consultation is to be considered

4) Creativity and innovation of students encouraged as part of their active participation in the classroom

5) Techniques that enhance a student’s sense of competence and self-worth.

(Brown, H. Douglas, 2001)

Teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy.

New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. (pp46-47)

Teachers’ Worries

Now that we see a unanimous agreement on the necessity of such a reform, why are there still few real actions taken? Of course there might be an addiction, or let’s just call it a habit of many teachers to exercise their “absolute” control over the classroom. Let’s put these people aside. Then who else? Some claim that they avoid having students speak out in the class not because they wanted to take the control, but in the fear of students’ loss of confidence due to their failure to say anything “decent” when given a task to. According to what I know from New Oriental School so far, even some teachers worry about receiving complaints from students who might argue that they were not actually teaching but wasting, or even worse, killing time. Or even if the students themselves do not say so, their parents might show up from outside of the classroom after class, pointing out how “irresponsible” the teachers are to one another and threatening to order the school to fire them. This has jeopardized many teachers’ sense of respect before students and make them feel they are running a risk for being a “maverick” in school because conventionally even innovation in teaching does not mean letting the students dominate a class. Then what? It seems to me that I, the Dean of the Comprehensive English Ability Training Department of my school, should first set free my teachers from the concerns and redefine the role of a teacher in a classroom of English learning.

Teachers’ Role

It is true that beginners in learning a language must gain a certain amount of knowledge in the form of explicit explanation of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary to be able to acquire that language further on in other forms. Once these other forms are available, they are, at least assumable, able to teach themselves. Many cases have been observed among students who attend New Oriental School, no matter if they want to prepare for a test or improve their influence in communication, and I think it is safe to make a conclusion that once motivated, most of them can make unbelievable progress within a very short period. These examples often serve a beacon light for teachers who hope to tap on the potential of their students but hesitate with a bunch of different concerns. As a matter of fact, the rationale of these wondrous feats of some of my students are not difficult to understand: there seems to be little in what the teacher seemingly ‘teaches’, e.g. grammar and vocabulary, which cannot be found in the book, the dictionary, or on the Internet. Based on that, we can question the foundation of the conventional role of an English teacher in a classroom

The process of mastering a language, like learning many things in this world, requires much more time of studying after class than in class. Hence we should turn to our real mission that we actually are granted in the process of taking the students on their own journey of experiencing the English language. In this way, we should design class activities that can serve as a platform to motivate students to express themselves in English. At least by so doing, we are able to attain two goals: to involve the students in the classroom interaction and to provide them incentives for further learning relevant fact-based knowledge from beyond the classroom. On the top of these two attainments, we can often witness an explosion of the students’ self-initiative to play their due roles in the classroom, and the released feeling from being enslaved by the drab doctrines enkindles an unlimited inner drive to perform on the stage presented to them by us teachers. Then comes a question: what should our focus be at a time like this? Listed below are some aspects I have thought of:

A.     to make sure that learners would have specific approaches that are more suitable for them to learn the language and make more rapid development.

B.     to guide learners to do in-class activities, thus likely doing after-class activities actively following in-class examples instead of being classroom slaves.

C.    to keep in track of where the students are in learning, thus giving on-the-process guidance.

D.    to refill the students with more initiatives if some setbacks are encountered.

E.     to help students gain confidence in their performance, thus in turn motivating students in learning that language.

Yet we might be misled if we go too far in the extreme sense of being “student-centered”, because many students sitting in the classrooms of English learning today are not mature enough in that they cannot be quite sure about the real purpose of studying such a foreign language. As their goal wavers from conducting communication to receiving praise from their teachers for gaining high scores, and sometimes even to simply following others as undoubtedly a must in their education. These “blind ones” might actually make up a large proportion in the student body and if winning their favor turns out to be the major concern of a teacher, a chaos can occur as their awareness grows with time and pushes them to raise new and different demands.

Possible Solution

Based on what we have discussed in the previous paragraphs, we are clear that what we need is a rationally designed “student-centered” classroom, not necessarily one with the support of the majority of the students. Let’s take the analogy of economics: while we know market economy ought to be the main stream now, we agree that it should be guided by macro-control. This is also true, as seemingly a universal rule of nature and of society in the development of everything, with the learner-centered classroom, where the teacher should enlighten students in understanding their real needs and goals, know when to take over the control that might have been given to students for a while, presuppose some, not all objectives for students in terms of curricula according to their similarity to previous students in a common sense (because a student’s potential can be incredibly applied by some ‘force’ and some objectives pre-set by the teacher or the authorities can ‘force’ students to make certain achievements in a certain period of study, which may avoid too slow progress in language learning without a ‘harsh’ push), guide students in creating anything in the language to avoid messy coining, know to what level to enhance students’ sense of competence and self-worth to avoid their being too conceited to be willing to learn anything new or to help looking down upon other students.

A Communicative Classroom

Current situation

According to the recent statistics, the average score of Chinese examinees in the Speaking Section of IELTS is the lowest in the world, which to me, was astonishing yet reasonably acceptable. Back in the 1990’s it is known to all that many Chinese students studying abroad fail to communicate effectively in English though their TOEFL score might be quite high. This has long been attributed to conventional way of English teaching in China that focuses everybody’s attention on grammar while ignoring communicative abilities. Students are supposed and encouraged to make certain achievements evaluated by Chinese English teaching system itself, achievements that supposedly show students’ English proficiency while not, and achievements that are made at the expense of skills in communication, which is so considered the ultimate purpose of a language. Therefore, educators of English from all over the globe appeal for communicative language teaching (CLT) that gives back to English learning its original genuine purpose.

Communicative language teaching aims at “real life” communication in the classroom, trying to get learners to develop linguistic fluency, not just the accuracy as has been long focused on in history (Brown, 2001). Teachers in such a classroom are missioned to facilitate students to perform prompt English communication that can be naturally extended to real-world situations outside.

One of the reasons for the CLT approach to have gained its popularity among language educators, as described by Mitchell (1994), was “its function as a corrective to perceived shortcomings with other approaches and methods, such as Grammar-Translation and the Direct Method.” (Bax, S., 2003). The end of CLT: a context approach to language teaching. ELT Journal Volume 57/3 July 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press (p278) However, as Bax (2003) argues, CLT is now having a “negative” effect in that it has always neglected one key aspect of language teaching – namely the context in which it takes place.

What is a language classroom for?

A language classroom serves as a place for student to learn the langue itself, instead of communication, though, in the eyes of many professionals, language study does serve the purpose of cross cultural communication, why do students have to sacrifice certain amount of time in classroom to obtain this communicative skills in a foreign language if students are proficient communicating in their own language? That is why complaints from students about the meaningless introduction of themselves in another language overwhelm me in class when I found the students already know each other for years, the same logic here if you ask me why many people refuse to practice English at an English corner. “As long as we know what we are to say in our own language,” according to one of my students during the break for refreshments, “what we expect to learn is how to say what we want to say in English instead of what to say”.

Realizing that, I take leave to doubt whether communication is priority in the language classroom though effective communication in a way is the basic purpose, how about the quality of language itself improved or not in the process? Let’s not forget we have to take time into consideration when we emphasize the effectiveness of language study through communication. Time is a very tricky factor that shapes the improvement of language that, hopefully, students utilize in communication.

Possible Solution

That the appreciation of efficiency of teaching a language outweighed the provision of “real” situation for random language generation is cleared pointed out here as is argued that CLT needs to be replaced as the main focus (Bax, 2003) or at least the fixing of the CLT conception needs to be done.

There is no oppositions here about the proficiency gaining through communication in English, however, a more direct approach to the usage of language itself, say, oral interpretation drills of typical expressions in various “real” situations, has witnessed more obvious success, since students are generally assumed to have no difficulty communicating in their native language. What might be the best idea when we train the students in effective communication in a foreign language on the condition of not jeopardizing their self motivation in learning lies in how we could assist the students in quick interpretation of what they want to express into the target language we are teaching.

An Intercultural Classroom

Communicative language teaching overlooked both the links between language and culture and the necessity to understand communication between non-native speakers and native speakers as intercultural communication rather than communication in the target language (Crozet & Liddicoat, 1999). Communication in a foreign language involves two cultures: the learners’ own culture and that of the target language. Though culture is seldom defined in for language educators, Jayasuriya (1990) argues that culture is best understood as “an interrelated configuration of archaic, residual and emergent cultures” (Crozet & Liddicoat, 1999).

Archaic culture: embodies past-historical patterns that appeared in history thus still reflected in proverbs, expressions or colloquialisms used in everyday speech nowadays even if no longer relevant or existent. For example, the English expression “raining cats and dogs” means raining hard because the rain was so hard that cats and dogs were trying to hide themselves under the mess on the roof of shabby buildings in the slum while falling down into the house due to the poor unrepairedness as if cats and dogs were like raindrops. Cats and dogs are not falling down into houses any more. Yet the expression is often used to describe the heavy rain.

Residual culture: represents patterns that appeared in the past yet still effective in modern society. For instance, in many Chinese students’ minds, what the teacher says is the Bible, which is due to the over trust and admiration of Fu Zi or Xiang Sheng in ancient China – equivalence to teacher in English. And Yao Tiao Shu Nu (Chinese) which first appeared in Shi Jing – analects of poetry – is still used nowadays to mean beautiful ladies.

Emergent culture: represents new appearances of being / thinking in modern culture that may more often than not reflect commonly seen phenomenon in a certain culture. A good case in point is the term “sunlight robbery”, which means to rob other buildings of their supposedly-enjoyment of the sunlight because of the too close distance between two buildings. And ‘wet ware’ means human brain simply because it is ‘wet’ in contrast to computer software and hardware as the computer are compared in name and function to ‘brain’ in Chinese.

Learning about cultures and why learning?

It’s clearly understood that culture can be best learnt through exposure to that of the target language. What’s more, It’s beyond doubt that a thorough understanding of a culture could be reached by studying in one (Kramsch, 1991), meaning to say culture is understood through intellectual efforts other than osmosis (Crozet & Liddicoat, 1999), though variations can be evaluated concerning their influence on result of relevant experiments underway. As language and its culture are intricately interwoven, culture is an integral part of the interaction between language and thought and language is the carrier of culture (Wang Lifei, 2000).

Culture, as Wang Lifei (2000) stated, is learnt rather than biologically inherited. Yet, the irony is a person immersed in a culture from birth may not be aware that s/he is culturally doing everything, or to be more specific, using that language. That is why Crozet and Liddicoat (1999) argued that learners, while learning another culture, need to know how to distance themselves from their own culture or native language in order to have a might-be-surprising knowledge about what their own culture really is. This can be achieved by comparing two or more different cultures. For example, Chinese beginners of English study usually struggle with sentence structures as in what is the preferred structure instead of what’s correct, as it does in the case when Chinese students would feel pretty confused over why English speakers are used to offering main ideas with complementary information adding to it instead of giving time and place, some additional information first before mentioning the core information like most Chinese do. The blood type of different groups of people might have reflected the reason. The straightforwardness in the characters of westerners might be due to the very blood type “O”, as compared to major blood type among Chinese “B” which indicates one’s “indirect” or “reserved” in character. That explains why the more commonly seen sentence structures in element order vary in these two languages though grammatically correct in both.  The learning of another culture leads to a very clear consciousness of cultural observation thus revealing a better approach to a more rational and systematic learning of one’s own culture, so I believe a successful language classroom should bond with intercultural teaching in the purpose of a better revelation of the target language as well as that of their own culture.

Since interculturalists see development of intercultural competence as a “general skill” which can develop “without learning a foreign language” (Crozet & Anthony, 1999) as in the example that quite many Chinese people, with very little knowledge about English (yes, no, hello, etc.), know that a person’s given name comes before his/her family name in English, which is just an opposite way to that in Chinese, it is not a must to learn interweave culture in language learning. Yet, a pre-learning of a foreign culture in one’s own language may help learners in learning the target language.

As Mase (1989) argued that native speakers generally do not expect non-native speakers perform as culturally the same as they do since, for instance, Chinese people would stun at the sight of an English speaking person practicing KongFu. The purpose of culture study lies in the intentional imitation of exotic cultural behavior as long as some negotiation be made to avoid awkwardness. Therefore, successful language class should involve culture and language so students can get a whole package of what a language has to offer.

Building a learner-centered, communicative, intercultural classroom. Why adopting the combination of the three?

To sum up, although being a too centered concept, the learner-centered classroom is prevailing over the teacher-centered stereo typical teaching methods, which might better benefit the students regarding the cultural understanding, language commanding as well as the sensitivity of a foreign language if appropriately conducted in China. At the same time, it has been widely accepted that a classroom without definite culturally communicative purpose is by no means a successful one through the eyes of both educators and the students, thus resulting in a student centered phenomenon in teaching. Hence, a combination of the three in a language classroom would be recommended for the sake of creating a self-motivated, culturally comprehensive language-teaching environment.

Such a classroom for speaking

My students are mostly college students who hope to study abroad in the future, most of whom see English as a necessary tool both for communication with foreigners as ideally their ultimate goal (though they may not come to class every time with that goal in their mind) and for a better job after graduation as a more immediate goal because this more directly relates to their career development, which in turn is assumed among many Chinese people to be the ultimate goal for learning English, for currently in China, a majority of ordinary people need a better job for better income, unlike many people in developed countries who take their jobs out of their interest because they do not have to worry about their living expenses. Thus, speaking and writing, which seem to be the most useful and direct skills for communication, are what my students show interest in. Speaking, however, as compared with writing, plays a more important role in daily face-to-face communication as well as in a higher chance of success in a job interview. Nevertheless, with a background of grammar-focused English education, dumb English seems to be resentment among students. Thus, most students wish to develop a perfect English speaking competence under guidance of the teacher. Therefore, English teachers in China shall bear that in mind. Otherwise, they may lose the significance of teaching English in the first place.

English-speaking competence could be, though there seem to be many ways, categorized into two aspects: informal and formal communicative skills. The former is mainly about daily communication that supposedly involves more cultural elements as in a wider range of English knowledge than the latter that is mainly for business though there is a special culture, which covers a smaller scope, in the business circle. To achieve the former, I shall bring into the classroom as a wide range of expressions as possible, though not possible to cover all, for Chinese-English interpretation. As my students, supposedly intermediate learners, are not able to think in English (otherwise they do not have to attend the oral English course at all), training of their quick response in interpreting what they want to express in Chinese into appropriate English might be a good way to infuse more spoken language within limited class time. Yet, as the monotonous infusion may lead to students’ loss of interest in the course, some hypothesized real situational practice shall be included in the main teaching flow, such as role plays, story-relay, and short plays, as a side purpose of reinforcing their knowledge about the expressions they have interpreted from Chinese into English.

However, students may be culturally unaware of their use of English, which may cause some shock and conflict in communicating with foreigners. Some cultural knowledge about English shall also be introduced to them, which can avoid awkwardness in their later communication and arouse interest among some English fans who may in turn influence the whole class in their eagerness to learn more about English. According to what I have found in my classroom, the approach of having students perform English short plays with before-class preparation can fundamentally improve their communicative competence through tens of times of rehearsals and significantly arouse their interest in taking the course as well.

As for the latter, a presentation involving more formal language, for example, longer sentences with more formal words and more complicated structures, may help students with their communicative competence in a business environment, such as discussion in a business meeting, which requires, of course, an introduction of knowledge of the special business culture. This is also what students have interest in and what benefits students meanwhile. “I gained a lot and experienced a lot in your class,” as one of my students told me in a friendly interview, “so much so that I, for the first time in my life, get to know that English is so interesting and useful.” Students in my class are supposed to give a presentation on an assigned topic once in a semester, three presentations each time, with question-answer and evaluation session after that. Through rehearsals and real performance on the platform, students have the first (maybe, at least a good one) try in their life on a formal talk in public. Some of them won prizes in speaking competitions.

Conclusion

We live in an age of explosion in so-considered modern and popular concepts and approaches for the teaching of a language. However, we still can find some gap between the assumed purpose and real purpose for both learning and teaching. To figure out what is really helpful and feasible is a big topic for language educators. I, as a Chinese English-teacher, have been in my career trying to creating a learner-centered, communicative, and intercultural classroom in an appropriately way. The key word “appropriately” focuses on:

1) Constantly reminding students of the real purpose they should be aware of in learning English. I am pointing out this because a popular so-assumed purpose of students learning a language is successful communication, which might be lost when they are forced to achieve high scores in English tests.

2) Staying aware of the time limit as a constraint for language teaching, which calls for the balance of quality and efficiency. If time factor is not taken into consideration, then any way that is related to a language or its target culture could be a good way we should adopt in a language classroom. Hence we must do what is truly needed to be done in a classroom while we leave the students to do more work after class.

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