Teaching ESL in China:

Challenges and Strategies

Robert Garmong

Global Institute of Management and Economics

Dongbei University of Finance and Economics

Dalian, China

Teaching ESL is never easy in any context, but it presents special challenges when the students are Chinese. Today I want to discuss some of these challenges, how my university department has attempted to meet the difficulties, and to what extent we have succeeded.

The Global Institute of Management and Economics is an international institute at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, in Dalian, China. The distinctive feature of our program is that classes are taught entirely in English, from day one until graduation. We offer a small range of majors at present: Business Management and Tourism Management, with Finance & Economics coming soon.

Our students have all passed a Chinese Gaokao exam — the university entrance exam taken by nearly all Chinese high school students — with English scores high enough that they are judged to be ready for an English-only business program. So we are often shocked when students enter the university, show up for their classes — and understand absolutely nothing their instructors are saying.

Students in Chinese primary schools and high schools are required to study English for as many as 6+ years, but they have very little practical English. They have learned how to pass exams in English without significant comprehension. To make matters worse, their teachers are typically Chinese, so the teachers themselves may themselves have very little ability to speak conversational English. Hence, the majority of Chinese high school graduates, whatever their scores on English exams, have never actually spoken English nor had to comprehend oral English. In my job as the Coordinator of the Freshman Year Support Center, I see them in the first few weeks of the semester, often panicking, telling me that they literally don’t understand a word in class.

For an ESL teacher to teach Chinese students effectively, therefore, requires special attention to the problems of Chinese learners. These problems can be broken into three related categories: educational background, cultural-methodological challenges, and institutional-administrative culture. Although these issues are probably familiar to you, it is worth laying them out in systematic fashion before discussing methods we at my Institute have used in the attempt to confront these problems.

I should note at the outset that this is a preliminary report. We are a fresh program, just a few years old, so we are only beginning to have some results to report on. We have been collecting data on as many facets of our program as possible, but the program is too new to have statistically significant numbers to report at this point. I present this as a work-in-progress, and I welcome your ideas and suggestions.

Educational Background

Chinese education is notoriously rote-based, and nowhere does this have greater impact than in second-language learning.

As I’ve mentioned, Chinese high school students typically take many years of English. The national standard is at least six years, though in some cases that is shortened due to the lack of qualified teachers. The nature of that education, though, is not at all conducive to actual learning.

Chinese students are drilled extensively in vocabulary, but they have little or no experience in practical English. Very few middle-school and high-school teachers would have any experience with practical English — almost none are foreign-born, and few have ever been abroad — so they themselves are uncomfortable with conversational English. Until recently, very few schools had access to audio-visual equipment by means of which to hear spoken English. For these reasons, students have very little exposure to English. I often find students who can read some English, but cannot pronounce a word, nor do they understand spoken English.

Just as important as the lack of qualified speakers and equipment, is the traditional Chinese method of instruction. Chinese philosophy of education in all subjects, from math to the humanities, is based on drills and recitations, with rote memorization as the intended result.

There are many problems arising from this system of education. First of all, students have very little flexibility in their English.

A colleague of mine at the university is a spritely man in his late sixties who loves all manner of sports, including table tennis. When he first arrived in China, he went to the huge gymnasium filled with ping pong tables and challenged some of the students to play. The students of course were eager to show up the old foreigner, and indeed they were quicker than he. But he soon learned that he could beat them every time.

Chinese students had practiced each shot hundreds or thousands of times, exactly the same way each time. A coach or a friend would hit the ball exactly the same way, to exactly the same spot, and the student would practice returning it perfectly. But once my friend learned the exact way they’d practiced a given shot, he could totally undo them by hitting the ball very so slightly differently from the way they were used to.

The same phenomenon pertains to Chinese students’ English language learning. Typically they have learned a number of sentence structures, exactly one way, and no others. They have memorized long vocabulary lists, but never put the words to use.

A precocious student of my acquaintance, perhaps 12 or 13 years of age, once asked her English teacher the difference between the words “gift” and “present.” Rather than answer this very reasonable question, her teacher dismissed: “‘Gift’ is not on our vocabulary list.” Students are discouraged from exploring anything not specifically intended for their exams.

As a result their knowledge of English, like their table tennis game, is easily undone. A student who has been taught only one “correct” way to express herself will not be able to understand the myriad grammatical structures and word choices that English makes use of.

A second problem of the educational background of Chinese students is that they are primarily taught declarative knowledge, not procedural knowledge.

The distinction between “declarative” and “procedural” knowledge is used by Keith Johnson to explain the difference between language learning and language acquisition. In brief, the distinction goes like this.

Declarative knowledge is knowledge about something — the ability to describe or explain it to another person — such as the classroom portion of a driver training class. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something — the actual, automatized performance of a task — such as the ability to get behind the wheel of a car and more or less reliably drive it to one’s intended destination.

Someone may have extensive declarative knowledge of a field without much or any procedural knowledge. A perfectly competent theater critic, for instance, may have no ability to act, write, direct, or in any other way actually put on a play. Likewise, someone may have excellent procedural knowledge of a complex skill such as shifting the gears on a manual-transmission car, but have no declarative ability to explain how it is done.

Learning a complex skill from another person — being taught — generally proceeds in the direction Johnson calls DECPRO: from declarative to procedural knowledge. That is, someone (perhaps a coach or a teacher) explains how to do something, then the student practices it (often with further declarative criticism from the coach) until the student’s knowledge becomes procedural. The goal of language learning is procedural knowledge, with declarative knowledge being the means toward that end.

The Chinese system of education unfortunately does not serve this goal very well. The Chinese system is entirely geared toward success on standardized tests, and it is much easier to test declarative knowledge than procedural knowledge of a language. Chinese teachers explain the meaning of a word, or the structure of some grammatical construct, so that students can repeat back the exact same information on an exam. To use Johnson’s terminology, we might describe the process as not DECPRO, but DECDEC: from the input of declarative knowledge from a teacher, to declarative knowledge output by the student on an exam paper. Procedural knowledge is largely left out.

While this may work for other subjects, this is disastrous for language learning, especially when students are learning the language for academic purposes. One can get through daily life in a foreign language without particularly thinking in or through that language, but academic success calls for analysis, synthesis, and detailed comprehension of course contents. Declarative knowledge is simply not adequate to this goal.

A helpful way to think about this problem comes from philosopher John Searle’s thought experiment called, coincidentally, the Chinese Room.

The Chinese Room thought experiment was developed as an argument against so-called Artificial Intelligence, at least as currently understood. Searle posited the following situation:

Imagine that someone who speaks no Chinese were put into a room with a small slit in one wall. Someone standing outside the room feeds slips of paper filled with Chinese characters through the slit.

The person inside the Chinese Room is given an exhaustive list of rules in “If… then” format. For example: “If the characters 你是中国人吗？come through the hole, then feed back the characters: 不是.” Following these rules, let us suppose that the person inside the room is able to feed back responses so apt that the person outside the room is completely convinced that the person inside the room is fluent in Chinese. Nevertheless, in fact the person understands nothing — he is merely following rules for manipulating characters he in no way understands.

Although it’s only a coincidence that the thought experiment uses Chinese (it could just as easily have been Arabic or Thai), this is very much the status of the students we see at our university in China. They have to some extent learned to manipulate the written symbols of English, but they have not learned to understand their meaning, to think in or through English, or to use the language in practical situations.

A final problem arising from the educational background of Chinese students is the top-down, teacher-first system of education that prevails in Chinese primary and secondary schools.

As I’ve mentioned before, students in Chinese schools are subjected to a hyper-structured system of study in which their every action is dictated and supervised by authoritarian teachers. Students are told at every moment of their day what they are to be studying and how they are to study it. As a result, they lack many of the basic skills of self-study that we take for granted in Western education.

Students often come to the Support Center expressing frustration with the vocabulary from their subject-course textbooks. I ask them what they have been doing in order to learn the new words, and invariably the answer is: “I look them up in the dictionary.” Okay, then what? I ask. Blank stare. My students have never learned to write their own vocabulary lists, create flash cards on their own initiative, or quiz themselves or a study partner. Likewise, basic concepts of note-taking and active reading are not taught in Chinese schools.

Cultural-Methodological Challenges

In addition to the challenges caused by the contents of the educational system of China, there are further problems related to traditional Chinese methods of education. Although the Chinese rightly pride themselves on their long tradition of valuing education, the form of that valuing presents tremendous problems for language learning.

The Chinese have a tradition of respect for the teacher, who is held up as an exalted figure. In a culture that is generally characterized by huge power distance, this means that the teacher was traditionally treated as an authority not to be questioned or challenged.

The high power distance characteristic of Chinese culture makes students unwilling to challenge a teacher in any way, including by asking a question (it being assumed that to ask a question implies that the teacher had not been perfectly clear in the first place).

Indeed, the Chinese language itself actively discourages students from asking questions. The word wenti in Chinese means both “question” and “problem.” Therefore, the sentence “I have a question” is identical to “I have a problem” or “there’s something wrong with me.”

Compounding both of these problems is the notorious culture of “saving face.” Students are afraid of losing face themselves, as well as of causing their teacher to lose face. Hence they don’t want to ask a question in front of their peers, and they don’t want to suggest that their teacher is imperfect in front of his inferiors.

There is one last major way in which Chinese educational culture clashes with Western ideas. This is the issue of plagiarism, vis-a-vis recitation of the classics.

Western instructors expect our students to provide proper attribution for their sources of information. We have been brought up in that culture since our early education, and we in fact become offended when students fail at this task. One Yale professor, responding to widespread plagiarism he observed while teaching in China, wrote that “when a student I am teaching steals words and ideas from an author without acknowledgement, I feel cheated.” He added that “I ask myself, why should I teach people who knowingly deceive me?” In fact, however, the concept of citing sources is foreign to Chinese students, most of whom have never done it before.

Chinese education traditionally consisted in nothing but recitation of the classics, along with carefully-scripted commentaries on them. Quotation marks — marking out the words of the classical authors, in distinction to one’s own — would if anything have been regarded as an insult to the reader, who would be expected to be familiar with the classics. Furthermore, Chinese culture has an assumption that, once a thought has been “perfectly” expressed, there is no need for it to be re-stated according to the author’s personal experience. Such re-thinking is a waste of energy.

Institutional-Administrative Culture

The above issues all pertain to the students’ readiness for foreign-language study. In addition to these issues, however, there are a number of exogenous factors pertaining to the typical ways a Chinese university is structured and administered.

Student choice is virtually nonexistent at a Chinese university. Upon admission, each student is assigned to a class of students in the same major, and all but a handful of courses will be taken with the same cohort of 20-25 students. There is no choice of schedule, and almost no electives available. This system further reinforces the students’ passivity and lack of self-responsibility. It also tends to create a powerful group cohesiveness within the class, and while it can lead students to take care of each other and bring weaker students along like soldiers on a battlefield, teachers sometimes struggle to establish authority when there are one or two dominant personalities in the student cohort.

A second institutional factor is that Chinese universities do not have a mechanism to fail students. Students study extremely hard at the high school level in order to gain admission to a well-ranked university, but once they are in, it is expected that all will graduate. Even to fail a student from a single class is all but unheard-of, because of the cohort system. If a student fails a single class, there is not a mechanism for him to take the class over again, unless he joins a whole other cohort. Knowing that they cannot fail has a very negative impact on certain students’ willingness to exert effort in class.

The last institutional challenge I will discuss pertains to the priorities of Chinese administrators. The current leadership of China has built on the longstanding Chinese tradition of using higher education as a means of social control as much as of training. In addition to the educational administration of university president, dean, provost, etc., there is a parallel (and in fact more powerful) hierarchy of Chinese Communist Party leadership. The Student Affairs office and all student activities are managed by the CCP.

Students are frequently taken out of class to participate in group-building activities and competitions of little or no educational use. Dance competitions, singing competitions, drama competitions, all take time away from class, sometimes with no prior notice or approval from instructors.

Some Solutions

These are the familiar problems with Chinese education, so now let’s look at some of the ways our university has tried to confront them.

First, I want to make the point that the problems indeed require active solutions. That is to say, it is not enough to simply remove the constraints placed on students by the Chinese educational system.

It is very easy for those of us brought up in a Western educational system to think that — as two professors wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education — “creativity is more or less an inherent trait, and … what we need to do for our students is to get out of their way, and to provide them with the environment and resources in which they can grow.” Would that this were true! Unfortunately, independent, creative thinking is not inherent, and in fact all of us were taught skills through our early years of schooling (in my case, it began with a report on the platypus, based entirely on the entry in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, under the patient guidance of my first-grade teacher). Students who have never had such skill-building experiences require far more than for their teachers to get out of the way.

Here, then, are just a few of the solutions the GIME has developed to deal with the challenges of Chinese ESL education:

1. Student Support Centers.

Beginning in the fall semester of 2012, GIME has operated two Student Support Centers, one for first-year students and the other for second- through fourth-year students. The Support Centers provide one-on-one tutorials with foreign teachers, audiovisual materials, and hand-outs. In addition to teaching staff, they are also staffed by student interns who can help students. Support Centers are open weekdays from 8 AM until 9 PM, and afternoons on the weekend. Foreign faculty staff them on weekdays from 8-5, with interns on duty at other times.

The Support Centers are themselves a quite novel phenomenon for Chinese students, most of whom have never had one-on-one attention from their teachers. This raised a problem of “marketing” for the Support Centers: how to drive students to come in for extra help when they needed it.

Two schools of thought developed within our faculty. The first argued for a very active faculty role in driving students to the Support Center. This group wanted to require students to come get help, especially when they had performed poorly on assignments.

A second view, which I termed the “Field of Dreams” view, held that “if you build it (the Support Center), they will come.” The Field of Dreams faction rightly pointed out that there is a logical tension between the goal of encouraging students to be self-motivated self-learners, and at the same time forcing students into the Support Centers. For this group, the proper solution was to remind students of the Support Centers’ existence, exhort them to come, and then leave it to the students’ self-motivation to bring them in.

The reality, however, is that the majority of our students do not respond to encouragement without incentives attached. During the two weeks after the students’ first graded writing assignments, using mere encouragement, we got an average of 32 visitors per week for help in the Support Center. Later in the semester, writing instructors began attaching slips of paper to student papers with failing grades, insisting that the student go to the Support Center for help. In the weeks when those slips were handed out, we received 45, 52, 58, and 46 visitors.

Despite the logic of the Field of Dreams argument, therefore, we have adopted the approach of incentivizing students to come. More work needs to be done to determine which sorts of incentives work best, how to structure the incentives, and how to encourage self-motivation in the students.

2. Student Mentoring

Since a major problem for our students is the power distance between teacher and student, we have introduced a system of student mentoring, beginning with the Support Centers.

At the beginning of the year, a group of thirteen interns were selected from sophomore and junior students in the program. Their main task is to provide minor administrative assistance in the Support Centers (logging in visiting students, decorating, etc.), but they are also encouraged to help students when faculty are already occupied or not on-duty. For many tasks, such as IELTS or TOEFL test preparation, the interns have more first-hand knowledge than faculty, and they have also shown unpredicted skills. A second-year student named Oliver, for example, has proven to be an excellent accent-reduction coach, even though his own English pronunciation is far from perfect.

The student-mentoring program has been very successful, though it is at this point only in its very early stages of development. We are currently exploring ways to make greater use of interns as a more approachable source of help for students who are nervous about sitting down with a teacher.

3. Language Lab with Tell Me More

As a way to encourage more contextualized and multi-faceted use of English, we created a computerized language lab with 30 Lenovo computers equipped with Tell Me More, a language program created by French company Aurolog. Each student has his or her own account with Tell Me More and is required to use it for at least two hours per week.

Like other language software, Tell Me More involves listening, reading, writing, and even speaking (with built-in pronunciation assessment that works reasonably well). This should help with the DECDEC problem: to broaden students’ procedural ability to use English in practical circumstances, rather than their declarative knowledge of vocabulary lists. In addition, the ability to re-try a lesson as many times as necessary, unlimited by available faculty time, should help students who struggle with some aspects of their language learning.

Furthermore, the fact that the learning takes place on a computer, rather than in front of a class, should help reduce the fear of “losing face” which hinders classroom participation. Anecdotal reports from students seem to support these benefits.

The implementation of Tell Me More has been suboptimal, however. Due to administrative foot-dragging, the system became available to us only after the semester was underway, and therefore instructors did not have the opportunity to design their own modules to support their in-class materials. As a result, the computer system has become a disconnected add-on to students’ classwork, rather than an integrated part of it. In future years, we plan to work with instructors to fix this problem.

4. Study Skills Workshops

In order to help students with basic study skills such as note-taking, self-study, and time-management, we have developed a series of workshops for students to take during their first year. These are two-hour sessions taught by our faculty, and each student is required to take at least three of them.

Anecdotally, students have found the workshops to be extremely useful, particularly when faculty have reinforced the skills in class. We are working on developing metrics to assess the effectiveness of each workshop, and for next year we will modify our offerings according to what we are learning this year.

Conclusion

The challenges of Chinese students and the Chinese educational system, combined with our mission to prepare students for full-immersion English-language Business Management and Tourism Management programs, have presented GIME with a very daunting task. My goal in this “report from the front” has been to present some interesting issues, as well as some ideas of how our program has met these challenges. Though the challenges are large and numerous, the solutions are there to be found. The future of China — a rising force in international education, as in the world economy and geopolitics — depends on how well the Chinese educational system as a whole can meet and adapt to these changes. As far as I am concerned, there could not be a more exciting challenge for an educator.

References

1. Johnson, Keith. Language Teaching and Skill Learning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

2. Searle, John R. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.03 (1980): 417-24. Cambridge Journals Online. Cambridge University Press.

3. “Foreign Universities Find Working in China Harder than They Expected.” The Economist (US) 5 Jan. 2013: n. pag. Print.

4. Coppola, Brian P., and Yong Zhao. U.S. Education in Chinese Lockstep? Bad Move. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Feb. 2013.

5. http://www.tellmemore.com/home.aspx#&panel1-4