Foreign culture in the classroom

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time for a change in my English as a Foreign Language classroom.  The lessons I’d been teaching had been disjointed one-off topic lessons that piqued the interest of a very small portion of my 825 (give or take) middle-school students.  The vocabulary used was scanty, I hardly addressed grammar, and pronunciation came in the form of mass-repetition of the whole class.  I’d fallen into a brainstorm/repeat words/play game pattern of  teaching.

This method certainly has its place in an EFL classroom, but I could tell that I was losing students every week.  More and more kids would turn back to their math homework after I introduced a topic, or stare out the window, or sleep.  I must admit, I haven’t been too much of a stickler for attention in these classes. In my opinion, nothing will enrage a student more than when the teacher is a Nazi and he isn’t even getting a grade for it.  The kids have enough stress already without this crazy laowai yelling at them for a class with no end result.  And let’s be honest – it’s much easier to just walk in the classroom, do the same stuff we did last week about a different topic, and walk out.  No muss, no fuss, very little prep, and all the free time in the world to watch hours and hours of bootlegged Will & Grace DVDs.

It took me several weeks to realize that this was sucking the life out of me, not to mention my students.  I began to realize that every day was dragging, and that while students seemed initially glad to see me, the class devolved into a bunch of newspaper-reading, whispering, or sleeping zombies.  And I devolved, too, though I was doing an awful lot of talking for a zombie.

Two weeks ago, after my students had their midterm exams, I asked them to do an anonymous class evaluation so I could see if any ideas popped up from the responses.  After asking the students if I speak too quickly in class, if they thought the class was helping to improve their English, what their favorite and least favorite parts of class are, and other similar questions, I posed the final question as a short-answer: “I would like to learn about…”

As I pored over the piles and piles of randomly-sized response papers, torn from various and sundry notebooks, it was not difficult to see the pattern that emerged.  The overwhelming majority of students listed topics of American culture, including food, music, sports, and the daily lives of American teenagers.  This prompted a dilemma however; I’m an English as a Foreign Language teacher, not an American Studies teacher.  On the other hand, many of the students expressed a desire to learn useful English, and who can blame them?  If they ever get a chance to use English again, how many of them will actually talk about the positive and negative aspects of various inventions (such as cars and the Internet)?  I’m proud of my “Inventions” lesson, and it went over well, but the students were right: it’s not useful.  It’s philosophical English, not conversational English.

I debated the best way to serve my students’ interest and to get them excited about English (few EFL teachers in China can argue for a more important purpose to our job; many a teaching philosophy theorizes that students who are excited about a topic are more likely to learn it).  The idea that will carry out the rest of the term struck me, not quickly, but at a slow boil, like a good hotpot.  I would teach my students to speak English as if they were in America; for the rest of the term, we’ll pretend they are exchange students to America, and they will be learning the English that their American counterparts use on a daily basis.

The first lesson in this series was an introduction to their host family – they would be living with two teenagers in Chicago (the big city near my hometown in the States).  I used descriptions and profiles of two of my cousins, one male and one female, who I happen to have pictures of with me.  We talked about adjectives to describe how people look and behave, and the students assigned adjectives to these teenagers from the US.  Then, I described the appearance of my cousins and the students had to draw a picture based on what I said.  Of course, accuracy wasn’t important, it was a matter of listening comprehension.  Then I showed the pictures around and everyone burst out with exclamations about my cousins.  “Beautiful!”  “Cool!”  “Cute!”  “Wow!”  At the end, I told the students that their new American friends wanted to know about their best friends back home in China.  What does your best friend look like?  What does he/she behave like?  The students could use the adjectives we’d already brainstormed on the board.  No more Miss Nice Katie; I called on students at random, hearing many I’d never heard speak before in the class.  I handed out candy for participation and sincerely thanked the students who spoke.

This lesson had it all: grammar, listening comprehension, activities, individual performance, an interesting topic.  My students shone; students I’d never heard before stood up and put together sentences about their best friends.  Students who couldn’t put together sentences were helped with scaffolding (“My best friend is…”).  A student with a stutterspoke through eight sentences teasing his best friend across the classroom.  No one died from the embarrassment, no one stormed out of the room in a rage, no one threw any desks.  Instead, people were speaking useful English that they might even use again in the future.

Lesson 2 has been about American food, and mid-week, it’s going well.  I tell them that the first thing their host family will do is take them out for a meal.  We talk about the assumption that American food is bad (often held by non-Americans).  Students laugh as I tell them that Americans don’t like to see food once someone starts chewing it, so spitting out bad food or chewing with your mouth open is strange and surprising to them.  Students excitedly shout out every American food they’ve ever heard of (and some suggest that Americans like to eat tigers and snakes).  We do listening comprehension with the contents of a man’s refrigerator that I found at the English Listening Lesson Library Online.  We talk about which parts of a meal Americans sometimes share, and which parts they don’t share.  We talk about American Chinese restaurants and how prevalent and how non-Chinese they are.  Students come to the board two-at-a-time (called on randomly, again – no more waiting for the same students to volunteer every lesson) to practice ordering food in a restaurant – twice with the dialogue on the board, and once on-the-spot with just a menu.

This series of lessons will give me the flexibility to talk about all the topics my students want to learn while encouraging them to speak useful English.  Next week, we’ll talk about American music, and the lesson practically wrote itself.  Students will talk about why they like or dislike certain songs, and then will learn lyrics to a popular song.  The “learn English lyrics” lesson appears to be tried-and-true in the EFL world, and I’m excited to give it a go.  All that’s left is for me to pick the songs and write down the lyrics.  And instead of only focusing on the one song, the lesson I planned exposes the students to four various kinds of American music.  After music, we’ll talk about movies, and then we’ll talk about Christmas the week of Dec. 25th.  Lessons about sports, school, and returning home (including getting directions and buying tickets at the airport) will round us up for the final farewell at the end of the term, and will hopefully leave my students with the confidence to speak useful American English in the future.