OVERVIEW
Many university professors in the United States and foreign teachers in China despair of getting Chinese national students more involved in independent thinking, class group participation and Western cultural exploration.
Recently, here at a Chinese university, I developed a model solution that seemed to address all these issues quite successfully. I offer my experiences below.
THE PROBLEM-BACKGROUND
One of the biggest challenges Western English teachers face when working with Chinese students is getting them to respond spontaneously to questions and to work interactively on class projects. Centuries of tradition has taught students to listen, behave passively and memorize rote passages. I will argue in other essays that this style of education is absolutely logical given the need for all students, regardless of their regional accents, dialects and languages to learn written Mandarin which is not encoded phonetically, and therefore cannot be easily “looked up” or “sounded out.” (Pinyin was invented only a few decades ago to help students type, and it only offers references, not exact word/character choice.) The basis of all children’s lessons has to be memorization, until, at least, they have mastered the 6000 or so complicated characters that a truly literate Chinese must know.
Here is an example from Google of a word that is pronounced and spelled the same in pinyin, but “spelled” with different Chinese characters to mean different things. This is a common phenomenon.
- Lí – Pears (梨, lí) are also uncommon gifts as they sound like separation (离, lí).
I believe four more reasons explain why Chinese university students may be hesitant to engage in creative interactions in class: Confucian tradition of obedience and modest behavior; fear of using a language they seldom hear spoken by a native of an English language country; Asian cultural hesitation to rise above the group and finally the “burnout” experienced by teens who have been pushed to incredibly high levels of achievement in order to pass difficult college entrance exams. The burnout, a well-recognized behavior often commented on by state media in China, expresses itself in many ways. All but a few students in lecture format classes sleep or play with their phones if allowed. (Normally, I forbid cellphones in class.) The majority of students do not take notes unless directly instructed to do so. All but a few English majors avoid reading English language books or watching English language media to improve their skills, and the majority confess no plans for putting their major (often assigned to them by others) to work in a profession one day.
The upshot is that many of my colleagues complain of throwing out a discussion topic to their classes only to be met by blank stares. Even calling on a particular student often yields silence. This is a marked behavior. Many of us have taught a variety of beginning English speakers in the US and abroad and we simply don’t experience the same level of hesitation from students. Spokespeople for colleges across the US also report major difficulties in prompting students to participate in class projects even if they reportedly speak good enough English to be placed at top American universities.
All in all, many University students in China do a perfunctory job, getting enough “right” answer on tests to pass on-the-curve grading metrics but not being able to use this knowledge in the real world in any practical way. I have come to love the youth of China, and I want to help them achieve their full potential as people, not as parrots.
CLASS HURDLES
Given all this, you can imagine my initial concerns when I was assigned to an English class of 90-plus students entitled, “INTERNATIONAL TRADE.”
With so many students, it would have to be lecture class on a subject that didn’t hold particular interest for English majors on a topic that was not only dry but kind of new to learners living in a country that had only just accepted free-trade capitalism relatively recently.
CHALLENGE 1: LANGUAGE LEVEL
The class was composed of many students working at radically different levels of English comprehension. I had no reason to expect voluntary class participation. And, I would have too many students to speak to individually during each class, so one-on-one coaching and monitoring would be out of the question. It wouldn’t be fair to the advanced learners to lecture at a snail’s pace for the lower level learners, and it wouldn’t be fair to the slower students to award much better grades to those who didn’t so much learn in my class as come to it with a big advantage. If I followed the example of others who had taught this class, I would grade based only on a written exam at the end of the year. Students would do as they have always done in China – cram and forget or fail.
SOLUTION 1: It occurred to me that best of all worlds would be to enlist the best English speakers to help train the slower learners. After all, trade is a collaboration between and among teams (countries, companies, government agencies, etc.). I could simply create groups that worked like real start-up companies headed by CEO s who were the best English speakers in the class. The grades of each company/group would depend on how hard they worked together to come up with the right answers, just as the fortunes of real companies rise and fall based on their understanding of world markets.
I determined that everyone in each group would work together to finish homework each week. They would keep and refine this weekly homework. On the last day of class, they would give me one copy of all the collected answers for all the weeks in the form of one final report. I would grade that collected work. Everyone would receive the same grade except for the team leader who would get an extra 5 points for organizing and motivating the others. The slower students would face peer pressure to contribute to the group welfare, and, whether in Chinese or English the better students would no doubt help them with concepts. In addition, each week I would call each group to the front of the class to explain their findings. I would call on the “weakest” members as well as the strongest to report their results in order to ensure that everyone had been given an equitable workload.
One note: Earlier I alluded to the fact that US professors complain that their Chinese national students don’t collaborate well in groups. Let me stress that this is most likely due to the English language barrier and a sense on the Chinese part that they don’t actually belong to a particular group assigned. In China, students create groups spontaneously and form very strong bonds. (Outside of class, for example, it’s not unusual for people who have worked at one kind of job in one factory for a number of years to retire to the same apartment building together.) Having observed the culture firsthand I suspect that many examples of what Western teachers consider student cheating would really be considered “helping for the good of the group” by Chinese.
So, on the first day of class, I performed a simple test to find out who the best English language listeners in class were. Quickly I asked, “Who among you can understand what I’m saying? If affirmative, raise your hand.” Nobody responded. Then, more slowly, I said, “Can you understand what I am saying? If so, raise your hand,” and finally, when the second oral test failed, I slowed down my request down even further. “If you can understand what I am saying right now, please put your hand up in the air like this.” Finally, 10 hands shot up. These became team leaders. I then asked students to count off to form ten team groups of “employees” headed by these leaders.
CHALLENGE 2: SUBJECT MATTER ENGAGEMENT
It seemed probable that students not be interested in the subject matter. My students were English majors hoping to become teachers, translators or employees at some international company, not entrepreneurs or business leaders. The class textbook was accurate, complete and bilingual, but very dry.
Most importantly of all, the textbook outlined capitalist principals to a students of a nation which was organized under a rapidly evolving communist-based system. These young people had grown up with totally unique ideas about the purpose of a bank, the legitimacy of protectionism and dumping and hundreds of other trade policies. Most of them had never (and probably would never) write a check or an invoice. Explaining “the basics” of capitalist trade would be an uphill struggle.
So, I asked myself, “What do these particular students really need to get out of this class?” Well, if they joined companies as translators they would need to understand the English language meaning of the trade and banking terms in the book, not the mathematical specifics of financial theory. They didn’t necessarily have to understand how to derive formulas for “competitive advantage,” for example, but I did want them to understand the difference between that theory and the older “absolute advantage.”
Students who would go into teaching or some other non-trade related job would also benefit by learning basic trade terms. This knowledge would allow them to thoroughly comprehend what was being discussed when listening to or reading world and national news.
SOLUTION 2:
Subjects are deemed “boring” when participants see no stake in the issue and no relevance to themselves or their world. I resolved to give my students a stake in absorbing the practical real-world meaning of trade terms.
Thus, I assigned each team a European country the team was supposedly “from,” an actual product often made in and exported from that country and a country to export the team’s goods to. I carefully researched these products so they would link together in a mutually dependent circle. Each team would export a product to another team’s country and import a product from another team.
I picked products to trade from vastly different categories – industrial, fashion, raw materials, medical products, auto, liquor, high-tech, etc. – so that the class could learn about special considerations and issues related to as many different types of goods as possible.
My syllabus mostly followed the textbook with the addition of an expanded marketing chapter. (After 20 plus years as a writer and brand strategist marketing international brands I felt competent to offer insights.) The teams were tasked with researching actual GDP, land/labor/capital considerations, laws within countries, financial instruments and practices, documentation, regulations, tariffs, insurance and distribution challenges as each of these things applied to their particular product.
The order of my lesson assignments forced the participants to explore problems a real importer/exporter might face in the actual order that a growing company would have to face them.
Students could see why various theories and practices had been developed to help “companies” like theirs succeed in an increasingly complex world. The class became a strategic game.
CHALLENGE 3: RESEARCH PRACTICE
In an effort to protect Chinese youth from influences they consider harmful, the government has placed firewalls around certain online material, and has heavily vetted other material normally available in US universities. (For example, the WorldCat archive is used heavily by university libraries in the United States to help students locate peer reviewed articles and books by scholars. That same archive is available at Shanghai university with Chinese scholars contributing as well. However, our university library was unaware of this resource, and so were the students.)
Therefore, students are unpracticed at reaching out to international resources. Many simply don’t know how to “surf” the worldwide web and select valid information sources from invalid ones. Many, for instance, do not know that legitimate government publication exist and are accessible in many countries, as Chinese laws do not always appear in an online form.
SOLUTION 3:
I spent a good deal of time each week tracking down relevant websites that were legal in China behind the firewall. For example, Wikipedia – overused and abused by US students – is restricted and was not on my list. On the other hand, I directed students to several EU government sites where they could gather important facts. I found a site they could study for international HS codes and another that would use those codes and country information to calculate taxes and tariffs on products for them. Although, admittedly, I had “handed” these references to students, they had to use their English translation skills to interpret the results and find ways to relate data to their own products and import/export countries.
Students found Chinese sites that helped them great deal, too. For example, when trying to ascertain the technical specifications of their products, many turned to TaoBao, that ubiquitous purveyor of pretty much everything. When they were unable to access ISO 9000 regulations on particular products, they turned to Chinese government regulatory boards to find rules which might be equivalent.
Best of all, students began to use their imaginations and creativity to come up with answers “outside of the box” and to explore the geographic, governmental and civic world beyond their internet boundaries.
CHALLENGE 4: LECTURE
So many of the concepts in international trade are esoteric! Clearly, non-native English speakers could be easily “lost in translation.”
SOLUTION 4:
I created hyper-simplistic PowerPoint presentations to explain complex concepts. Instead of showing mathematical formula more suitable to business majors, I often used pictorial elements to express an idea such as “comparative advantage.” (BELOW)
IF ONE CHINESE WORKER IS MORE EFFICIENT THAN ONE AMERICAN WORKER IN MAKING BIKES OR IN PICKING WHEAT -ABSOLUTE ADVANTAGE IN BOTH SECTORS
YOU WOULD THINK THAT CHINA SHOULD ALWAYS SPLIT WORKERS EQUALLY IN ALL FIELDS WHERE THEY RULE.
BUT LOOK WHAT HAPPENS IF WE SHIFT WORKERS TO THE CATEGORIES WITH THE GREATEST COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
BOTH COUNTRIES PROFIT BY CREATING AND SELLING MORE. AND THE WORLD BENEFITS TOO.
SOLUTION 4, CONTINUED:
Every week all groups together worked through mistakes in their homework during the front-of-the-class presentations. I broke my usual “no cellphones” rule so that the students waiting on-deck, so to speak, could furiously recalculate or improve their answers as the review made the previous week’s concepts more clear to them. This was in no way “cheating” since the final test would be a presentation demonstrating thorough understanding of how to successfully export a particular product rather than a test of their rote memorization skills.
RESULTS:
Rather than facing the usual blank stares, I often found it difficult to keep the class quiet as they huddled together to improve weekly work.
Perhaps the most exciting and interactive moment of the class was the day when I assigned a sales contract negotiation. Chinese people are excellent at bargaining and not at all shy about haggling. Shopping is practically a blood sport! So, I stationed all the teams around the room positioned end-to-end, importer to exporter. (As I mentioned earlier, the teams formed a closed loop.)
I instructed each group to agree with the appropriate exporter to “buy” at least 1000 euros of an import from the exporting country. The exporters could use any means of persuasion possible to sell as much of their product as they could to their target market so long as they could explain the terms of the contract. Lower prices thanks to economies of scale? Faster delivery? Quality assurance? Easy payment terms? Niche marketing? Any reasonable idea they had learned in class was fair game. Negotiations grew very intense, but each group managed to get another team to sign on the dotted line.
Final projects far exceeded my expectations. Team after team revealed that they not only understood the big ideas behind international trade, they had discovered unique and clever aspects of making and marketing their own products that I hadn’t pointed out to them. Most presentations were pages and pages long, written with details that clearly could not have been copied from online sources. When presenting their findings on the final day of class, every member of each team was able to spontaneously answer questions put to them about the meaning of a randomly picked section of their team’s report.
I told the students how proud I was of them for jumping in, exploring, listening and using their creativity to go beyond what they had been taught in class. This was truly the most engaged and independently thinking class I had ever taught in China.
I hope some, if not all, of these techniques will prove useful to you when teach Chinese nationals or other reticent students.
