Communication Breakdown

So this morning when I got to work, one of the SCs—Echo-- approached me and asked, “So, Heather, hi!  OPT questions.”

 

OPT stands for Oral Placement Test, and I’d conducted three of them yesterday. 

 

“Okay, hi.  What about them?”  I asked.

 

Echo and a CC—Sky--who’d approached looked at each other and back at me.  Sky said, “OPT questions.”

 

“Yes,” I nodded.  “Okay.  What about the OPT questions?”

 

Sky and Echo looked at each other again, spoke a few brief sentences in Chinese.  “OPT questions,” Echo said again, slower, as if translating.

 

“I know,” I said, a bit impatiently.  “I did three of them yesterday.  What do you want to know?”

 

They traded glances.  Chinese flew through the air.

 

“Uh…”  Sky said, smiling at me.  He looked at Echo and nodded.

 

“OPT questions…which ones…?”

 

“Oh!”  I said.  “Which ones did I use?”

 

They nodded eagerly.

 

“It depends,” I said.

 

They looked put out.  “It depends on the student,” I explained.  “I try to focus on their interests and get them to talk about what they know, what they like.”

 

“Oh!”  Sky said.

 

“Norhaine (my old boss) used to use the same questions every time.”

 

“Oh, Norhaine!”  Echo said.  She smiled and looked pleased.

 

“But I don’t use the same questions every time.”

 

Sky looked down at his shoes briefly.  I could tell my answer disappointed him.  The SCs and CCs are famous for giving students the complete PPT of lessons beforehand (if the student requests).  The result, however, is a student who memorizes the set responses.  If you go off script even once, many of these students give you a blank look.

 

The CCs (not the teachers, interestingly) are given some kind of bonus if their students progress at a certain rate, hence the “cheat sheets”.  But, as an educator, I don’t think they’re doing their students any favors by giving them lesson material ahead of time, or by trying to help them skip levels for no reason.  I once had a student who requested to change from a level 5 to a level 8.  No reason was given.  I very politely told her CC there was no way I’d approve such a change, as it would probably hurt the student more than help her.

 

An American woman I knew who worked with Disney English was told, straight up, to lie to the parents of her young students.  Bonuses were given to their staff (again, not to the teachers) as well if students moved up a level.  So students were often moved up.  The American woman told me many of the students were moved up to levels where they understood nothing.  If the parents wondered about this (“Why doesn’t Wang Junior speak English to me at home?”) the teachers were told to say “He speaks English to me in class just fine.”  This teacher ended up quitting before her contract was up, simply because the ethical implications bothered her too greatly.

 

My coworkers Sky and Echo had probably been hoping that I had a formula, a set list of questions—so that they could give them to students before the Oral Placement Test.  So that the students could memorize their answers and be placed in a higher level to start with.

 

But wasn’t the whole point of an OPT to test their English level as it stood at present?  Anyone can memorize answers.  It’s what I call “monkey work”.  As in, “Even a monkey could do it.”  I felt fairly confident that, given time and a cheat sheet, I could memorize answers in Chinese that could place me as an Intermediate speaker—although that is the farthest thing from the truth.  Just because I could “ape” Chinese didn’t mean I understood it.

 

And then there are the students who try to memorize the “rules” of English.  I have students who’ve studied English grammar for a decade or more.  To be honest, I haven’t.  As a high school English teacher, I didn’t harp on grammar.  Once a week I’d conduct a grammar mini lesson, and grammar was part of each student’s grade, but literature and its themes were always the focus of my classes.

 

My Chinese students often like to corner me and try to trip me up on grammar.

 

“Knowing grammar is one thing,”  I said yesterday, feeling embarrassed (and not for the first time).  “Your grammar knowledge is great.  Some of my students know even more about grammar than I do!”  It’s true.  I hate to admit it, but they do outsmart me sometimes.

 

I may not know the proper names of things (intransitive verbs and dangling participles, anyone?), and I may have a hard time explaining the more complex ones, but I rarely make any grammatical mistakes in my own speaking or writing.  I’m not perfect, but English is my mother tongue and I’ve been speaking it for 37 years.  No matter how well my students think they know grammar, in straight up conversation, they always make half a dozen mistakes—minimum.

 

“Knowledge is wonderful!”  I told them.  “But now you must apply it.”  And a few of them looked like they’d never considered this before.  Isn't the goal in life to memorize?  I swear some of them were thinking it.

 

Education in China, I’ve read and I’ve heard from my students, encourages sitting in silence, writing, reading, memorizing.  Speaking practice is often repeating, as a class, whatever the teacher says.  Thinking--or speaking--outside of the box is not encouraged.  It is even seen as a disciplinary problem, depending on the school’s administrators.  American students complain about the same problem in U.S. schools, but most teachers I know encourage questions and comments from students.

 

China is a country famous for luxury brand knock-offs (I saw a Colvin Kleln t-shirt today) and copies of Impressionist art that are almost spot-on.  I think China has a gift for this, and it has its place and its uses.  That place, however, is not in education, in my opinion, and especially not in a language school.