Author: mabadmin

The whole gang assembled this morning at 9:00, booklets containing all the China Daily articles were distributed…and…off we went!

 

My first group is Class 5, which consists of 13 young ladies and one young man, all of whom are studying nursing.  Three are from the area around Jilin; one is from the mainland in the southeast, near Taiwan, and most of the others are from provinces south and central relative to Beijing.  Since class membership is assigned randomly by the university, the students don’t necessarily know each other — and I have no way of knowing their level of English facility.

The first hour, as planned, Fr. B presented his article, “Racism Comes out in the Wash” (see http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2016-06/06/content_25617356.htm). He began with the vocabulary, which is or isn’t the best way to start, depending on your article and the vocabulary itself. Then he read through it, explaining a bit along the way. At 9:45 the Class Leaders escorted us to our rooms and we got started.

My plan:
10:00 to 10:30 Introduction, Dictation,
10:30 to12:00  Reading Aloud, Vocabulary Review, Discussion
2:00 a speaking game based on Twenty Questions;
3:00 to be determined
Reality:
10:00 to 12:00 Introduction, Dictation, Reading Aloud, Vocabulary Review
2:00 to 2:30 Reading Aloud, Vocabulary Review
2:30 to 3:00  Pronunciation Drill
3:00 to 3:45  Speaking Exercise using new vocabulary

I introduced myself as I did last year:  greet them in German, French, Spanish, and Korean before reverting to English. Of course, they were surprised and interested.  I gave them my Chinese name, which seemed to please them very much.  Then they introduced themselves:  name, hometown province, major in school, English name.  This group all have English names:  the boy is Mark, there is Judy, Jennifer, Jane, two Alices, Mary, Maria, Betty and I don’t recall the rest.  We slogged through the article, each student reading six or eight lines of text aloud and stopping to explain vocabulary and for me to paraphrase the meaning of the text.  It is hard work, because in a country where you can easily be xenophobic and almost as easily have ethnic prejudices, the idea of racism seems to be not only a foreign concept but a completely natural one.  I described how American society works (in the main!) with colorblindness a goal. They did not seem to appreciate why it would be desirable.

As students read aloud I listen for patterns of mispronunciation. Several cannot distinguish V from F, sometimes V from W. As we expect, the short I in “it” is generally pronounced like the long E in “eat”.  No big problems with R and L, nor with TH and “th” (voiced and unvoiced, as in “the” and “thin”).  There is a tendency among Manadarin speakers to drop final consonants (e.g., “I will get my ha” and not “haT”); this problem is rare in this group, but there are two students who over-pronounce the final sounds, creating an extra syllable:  I read-a the book-a.  This is especially noticeable in words with with a silent E at the end.  Slope becomes slo-puh, lake becomes lay-kuh.

After lunch it’s essential to change the pace, so we persevered through the last four paragraphs and then I distributed one of my homemade pronunciation drill sheets.  There are about 20 groups of competing sounds and words that may be mistaken for another:
while–whale–wile, wear–ware–where
slip–slop–slap–slope–sloop–scoop–scope
and so forth. This is fun to do, and a challenge to me as well, since I introduce each group by saying them as quickly as possible.

For the last period, I paired the students up using Uno cards (find the person holding the card that matches yours, then work together.  I gave each pair an index card on which I had written three vocabulary words from the lesson, plus a random noun such as potato, policeman, shoe.  Their task was to create a few sentences forming a little story using all four words.  Since it was Day 1 I permitted discussion in Chinese, and let them write their story down in English so they could read it if speaking was hard.

These students were challenged!  One or two are very good speakers, another couple are fluent but hard to understand, several are very halting, and one or two are impossible to understand.  However, they did all right using some very tough vocabulary and of seven pairs of partners, three came up with quite imaginative little stories. The best was the girls who were given Coca Cola for their noun. They told us that Coca Cola is magic and if you drink it your accent will disappear.

Prayers at 4:30, some note-comparing with the other teachers, a little blogging…and now back to the hotel to read tomorrow’s article and review tomorrow’s vocabulary.

It’s official — I have a Chinese name!

Sadly for us, Dr. D has left, continuing his travels with the Hong Kong Maryknoll teachers to do a little sightseeing and school-visiting before returning home.  Before he left, I asked him to give me a Chinese name.  It is Bai Zhu En (pronounced Bye-Joo-Un).  Bai is for the first syllable of my surname and means White…with a connotation of pervasiveness. The next two syllables are literal translations of my first and second names, Pearl and Grace.

One of the minor annoyances of teaching in China is that Chinese faculty are addressed by a title (Teacher or Professor, etc.) and their surnames but foreign faculty are invariably addressed by first name only.  Phooey on that, say I.  With a Chinese name like this I can ask students to call me “Ms. B”, which is what my students back home always call me.

 

 

 

 

In addition to our tour of the campus, all the students and teachers convened in the late afternoon.  Teachers got a front-row seat.

Leo acted as Master of Ceremonies (in both English and Mandarin), while Fr. B and a Chinese professor welcomed everyone, thanking the students for their dedication in giving up part of their summer in order to attend, and thanking the foreign teachers who came all the way from America — at their own expense!  (Insert a chorus of “Ohhhhh!” here.)

Teachers were assigned to their classes — I have group 5 for the first three days, while Ms. K (my hotel roommate) has group 1. Since we will teach only four groups apiece this year, this means she and I can share lesson plans and materials with no fear that students will have both of us.

Also discussed were the order of China Daily articles and the teachers who will present them.  Fr. B wants us to concentrate a bit more diligently on the articles, since the topics are important social and moral questions.

We greeted a few repeat students and some program alumni who are here for the summer for other reasons, then we headed off to a wonderful dinner with Maryknoll teachers from Hong Kong. These folks are not Americans or English teachers, but Hong Kong folks who teach at Maryknoll’s five primary and/or secondary schools there.  Maryknoll runs the schools under contract from the government of Hong Kong, which means they are not private schools and so must follow government regulations — which means there is no possibility of my working at any of them because the “NET program” (Native English Teachers required in each school) has a mandatory retirement age — and I am past it.  If I want to work in Hong Kong it will have to be at a private, for-profit language school or an International School or religious school, probably of another faith.

I chatted with several ladies from Maryknoll Sisters Schools (a combination elementary and high school that teaches in English) and they were kind enough to agree to let me visit the schools when I return to Hong Kong. I’m longing to see how an “English MOI” (Medium of Instruction) school works in real life in a country where one’s mother tongue is relegated to “foreign language” status.

Wonderful Chinese Dinner

 

Today the group got its first look at the facilities we’ll be using.

Of course, we had to pose for pictures in front of the library/administration building.

Our guide for the tour was Leo, s a very tall (6’5”?) and very nice young man we met last year who is now the Head Student for this year’s program. This means that he’s in charge of supervising about 15 subordinate Class Leaders and ultimately responsible for the behavior of all 180 students.  He is staying at the hotel with us and is additionally tasked with ensuring that none of us gets lost.  I’m very glad he’s been given this position. He’s an avid student and quite a lot of fun.

He walked us to the university, where we met Ms. W, who took us to Fr. B’s office for worship services.  The office doubles as a meeting place for students who want to practice English and so is stocked with drinks and snacks. It makes a great teachers lounge and is the only place on campus with air-conditioning and one of the few places with Internet access.

The campus originally served the Chinese air force as a medical school, so there are a couple of 1960s-era airplanes on display.  Though a relatively prestigious place for the Chinese to study (very hard to get into), the facilities are rather run down by western standards, though to be fair we are visiting during vacation period and so upkeep probably is taking a hiatus. We ended our tour at the Teaching Building, where all our classrooms are located.

The first session of each day will take place in a large, tiered room with a projector and a loudspeaker system. After that we’ll disperse to individual classrooms. Some of them are also tiered, with fixed furniture; some have flat floors with fixed furniture, which usually seats students in banks of four.  If you’re lucky enough to have a room with “loose” furniture the students generally sit in pairs at small table-like desks.  Every room has a digital projector and screen, though it’s not likely that most of us will use them. More important, to me, anyway, are the large chalk boards.  And the podium – that is, the teacher’s platform at the front of the room.  Ms. R, who has taught two semesters in southern China, explained that generally the Chinese professor sits at a desk on the podium and lectures from there. Students listen, absorb, and occasionally parrot back what they’ve heard.  I like to get close to the students, so I can hear them and so they can watch me when we do pronunciation drills. I also like to write on the board, so I’m constantly hopping up and down onto and off of the podium.

I wonder if this year I’ll actually fall on my face…

 

 

We crossed the border from the Hong Kong New Territories into “Mainland” China and thence to the airport at Shenzhen, a huge and bustling place that, like Brasilia and Washington, DC, (and Londonderry, Northern Ireland?) was deliberately designed to be built on nearly vacant land. A generation ago there was nothing there but a fishing village.

On the way to Jilin we had one brief stop, where we found two things you don’t (to my knowledge!) see in American airports:
–  Karaoke booths (in case you just HAVE to sing while waiting for your plane?)
–  Drinking water dispensers (reflecting the fact that practically nowhere in China is the water safe to use directly from the tap)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also encountered the standard “sanitary facilities”, to wit, the squat toilet. These are the norm in public lavatories, including the university in Jilin.  Places that expect a certain number of foreign visitors usually have one or two “western style” toilets, though these are apparently becoming more common in response to the aging of the population.

The sign in the stall doesn’t make things quite clear:  you must never flush the paper (as the waste water pipes cannot handle it).

Flying north we saw some very beautiful, and some very sad, scenery.  As in continental Europe, the Chinese custom has been to build a small central village, usually of several rows of attached dwellings, surrounded by the cultivated fields or orchards or nurseries.

So much of the land we flew over was as lush and green as Ireland, crisscrossed by the occasional high-speed rail line and/or (largely under-used) superhighway, more often by wide roads that appear to be unpaved, and by rivers practically snake-like in their twists and turns around hills and terraced agricultural land.  The sad part was, how often these waterways spread out into what I thought at first were large lakes and later realized were simply huge flood zones.  Once looking at it with this understanding, I could detect submerged fields and roads, beached barges (where the water had receded), and it one case, what I believe was a half-destroyed bridge.  As the area around Jilin had been affected we were greatly relieved to find that the bulk of the local troubles were on the outskirts of the town, although electricity had been temporarily cut off in the neighborhood around the university.

Ms. W got us all checked into our hotel, and we’re looking forward to orientation.

You know you’re really in China when all the planes carry names of airlines you’ve never encountered before!

Mr. J #2, Mr. J #3, Ace, and the second Mr. P are all young Chinese men, post-graduates. They are with us to get some practice in their English, and join the group in Jilin as students.  A few evenings ago I stopped to chat with Ace, whose spoken English is rather limited and who, like the others, appeared rather discouraged because he couldn’t easily follow the training classes.  He showed me his notebook, wherein he was (vainly) trying to translate Dr. D’s class outline.

One of the problems I saw last year with Jilin students is heavy reliance on translation devices or App’s, rather than using any kind of English to English dictionary. This is due, of course, in part to the fact that the average English-English dictionary is too difficult for young English speakers or for English Language Learners (ELLs) to use profitably. Based on a paper I wrote last fall for one of my classes, I gave Ace (and, later, my fellow teachers) the URLs for three online dictionaries that are designed especially for use by ELLs.  These dictionaries provide simple definitions, lots of synonyms, the ability to hear the correct pronunciation; sometimes they even provide examples of proper and improper usage of the new word or phrase.

A couple of days later, Ace pulled me aside to tell me that he had tried all three dictionaries and that the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (www.ldoceonline.com) was the one he liked the best. I was pleased he had tried them all, and was particularly happy because I, too, think that Longman is superior to Merriam Webster and Macmillan (the other two I had suggested).  Ace seemed reassured that continuing his studies in English wasn’t going to be as hard as he’d feared.  He was, however, accessing the dictionary via wireless on a tablet. Since Jilin Medical University does not have wifi, I don’t know whether students there will be able to use it.  Ace said that one of the dictionaries (I don’t recall which) has an App for use with phones, so perhaps that will be the way to go.

ELL-oriented dictionaries to look at:

• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
  ldoceonline.com
• Macmillan Dictionary
  macmillandictionary.com
• Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary
  learnersdictionary.com
• Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary
  http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english
• Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
  http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british
• Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
  oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com

 

Today was our last day in Hong Kong.  Dr. D delivered his last lecture, somewhat to our disappointment, because he’s a great resource and because he didn’t quite finish the syllabus. All the same, we sure learned a lot about the forces that shaped Chinese thinking through the centuries and even today.

Ms. W gave the most entertaining part of our training:  a presentation she calls “East and West”.  Based on drawings by a Chinese-born German, it contrasts Eastern and Western attitudes towards time, family, work, etc.  Here’s an example.

Ms. W also explained the concepts of “face” and “reciprocity”, both of which drive nearly all dealings in China and which are important in our teaching even in so short a program as this.

So it’s “goodbye” to the House of Prayer, and off we go to Northern China.  I’m going to miss this little Home Away from Home…

and my new Best Friend.

 

 

 

 

And now…off to pack up.   The bus departs at 6:15 in the morning.

 

Due to heavy rains, the city of Jilin has been experiencing flooding this past week.  Jilin is just down river from a large dam that holds a huge lake; the opinion here is that they must have had to let some water out of the dam.  In any case, the town is in a serious situation.

We’ve seen some horrific pictures and videos of this. Please keep the folks there in your prayers.

Dr. G continued his lecture today, discussing the Three Teachings (Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism) and how they have historically been interrelated in the lives of common peoples, rulers, and “the bureaucracy”. The importance of ancestors in daily life and belief was touched on, and should be fleshed out in some detail tomorrow.

Ms. W gave us another installment in her very intensive “crash course” in Survival Mandarin. Today she presented courtesy phrases, how to make requests, numbers, and names of things to eat and drink. And everyone’s favorite phrase, “Make it cheaper!”  (i.e., come down a little on the price).

While I believe that I have a knack for languages I have to admit that I am getting nowhere with Mandarin.  I really have to ascribe it to the circumstances under which it’s being introduced:  hurried and focused on spoken mastery without addressing the underlying logic. And I really can’t hear many of the sounds.  I learn better via other methods…which I will certainly need if I go on any further with it.

After lunch, the Divine Ms. M (my roommate last year) and Mr. G (another 2016 alumnus) and I did a little panel presentation to give the new folks an idea of what to expect and how to deal with it.  Dr. G, who has also taught the summer session, and Ms. R, who has taught two semesters elsewhere in China, added very valuable comments.

People seemed a bit reassured, and afterwards we chatted about plans for our classes and the kinds of things they wanted to try.  Ms. K wants to do a shared session with me, which I think will be great, but we agreed to wait a few days until everyone was “settled in”.

As I feared, rather than adding an “after school” session each day for optional activities that would include more teachers and fewer students, we are simply adding an extra session of regular class.  The activities I planned to be optional can be done, but not as I wanted:  smaller, faster, and louder than the rest of the day.  I am disappointed, to say the least.   But since this year’s program has fewer teaching days than in 2016, adding a mandatory session ensures the students don’t receive less than those who attended last year.

Another dissappointment, and an example of the way the Chinese think:
I sent Ms W and Fr. B the final questionnaires for my research project a couple of weeks ago, to which Fr. B had replied, “We do not have permission from the university to do this.”  Today I asked Ms. W, “Does that mean that they refused?  Or does it mean that we are waiting for a reply?”  She said that in China, no response means “No”.  I had anticipated this, so I asked whether we could ask the other teachers to simply read the first questionnaire to their students and have them write their responses, as if in an exam. This would, even without the second questionnaire, still provide helpful information. Ms. W looked very uncomfortable and said we really couldn’t, in case the university found out.

So, cultural lesson learned:  when we in America hear nothing, we assume all is well; when they in China hear nothing, they know nothing is what will happen.

I’m glad I didn’t have a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation riding on this.

Dr. D’s lecture today focused on the languages of China and how Chinese writing developed into a lingua franca across East Asia.  One of the problems/advantages, of course, is that the writing carries with it no indication of how the words are pronounced, unlike alphabet-based writing systems in which the sounds are represented but meaning is less readily identified.  I think we can draw a parallel with the pictograph systems used by certain American Indian groups in the western states, or with American Indian sign languages, which were interpretable despite differences in language.

At this point, I can recognize about a dozen Chinese characters:  person, day, month, king, forest, and a few others.

Training today was also graced by the presence of Kenzie Lau Kwong, PhD, a friend of Fr. B’s who is a graduate of one of the Maryknoll girls’ schools in Hong Kong. Dr. Kwong is a founder of Leaders’ Quest, an international organization devoted to bringing leaders from different countries together to identify, understand, and start work on solving important problems around the world.

She gave us a very frank picture of China’s current problems and challenges, and our first real insight into the situation of the average Chinese citizen…especially vis à vis the Hong Kong citizen.  Under the slogan “One Country, Two Systems” there are significant differences between the Hong Kong Semi-autonomous Region and what is still called The Mainland or China (rather than “the rest of the country”), especially in such areas as economic and personal freedom.  Dr. Lau addressed topics such as economic initiatives, government-powered urbanization programs, environmental concerns, and education. As with most of our training, a very large amount of important information delivered in a very short time!

To learn more about Dr. Kwong’s work, please visit leadersquest.org.