ELT teacher training in Mainland China from
1970’s to 2010’s
Late 1970’s ELT in Guangzhou for key
teachers in middle schools in Guangdong province
In the late 1970’s, China was starting to
open up after decades of closed-door policy. To communicate with the outside
world, millions of Chinese would need the lingua franca, English. Thus for the
first time after the establishment of the People’s Republic, English was made a
compulsory subject in all primary schools. This policy would take effect from
the coastal areas earlier than the inland regions. To cope with the need to
increase the number of English Language Teaching (ELT) staff, different places
had different measures in place.
When teachers in Hong Kong learnt of the
need of the Guangdong province, many were eager to help during the summer
vacation. In 1979, I went to see the Head of Education Bureau, Mr. Lau, and the
Deputy Head, Mr. Chan. I explained to them that a group of teachers would like
to offer help by sharing their teaching materials and teaching methodologies
with their mainland counterparts on a voluntary basis. We just need to be
provided with accommodation and food during our stay. Both Mr. Lau and Mr. Chan
were very impressed with our plan and welcomed the timely help given free of charge.
They wanted to put us into a good hotel in Guangzhou and used a coach to ferry
us to the school every day. I informed the Heads that our Hong Kong teachers
would like to live with the mainland teachers in the same dormitory of the same
school so they did not seem “above” of their counterparts in Guangdong. All we
asked was to have the toilets cleaned properly and whitewashed so there would
not be that stink very common in mainland toilets those days. Our request was
accepted and we were allowed to live together in the same school, Zhixin, a key
school in Guangzhou.
I was busy back in Hong Kong. I went to big
publishers such as Longman and Oxford and asked for their old editions of
Primary school textbooks and storybooks. They were generous and gave us a few
boxes of books in perfect conditions. To take books into the mainland was not
easy at that time. I went to the Education Bureau a couple of times to get the “red
letter headed” official letters to show the immigration at the border. I also
sought official documents to show that we were a group of volunteers,
non-religious, non-profit making and working out of love for our motherland.
We had a group of great volunteers, from
primary school teachers to university teachers, male and female, young in age
and young at heart. We took money from our own pockets and bought two
typewriters, a lot of wax paper for printing, crude printing rolls and ink, A4
sheets of paper and other teaching materials that we needed. We also prepared a
booklet in Hong Kong and made enough copies for lectures and workshops. But we
felt that once we met our teacher trainees, we would need to prepare more
materials and thus we took the typewriters and printing equipment with us..
At the start of the summer vacation, the
team of us, more than 30 teachers, started our journey to Guangzhou. Some of us
had never been into the mainland, others had gone there when they were small
and so this group was rather timid when crossing the border into Shenzhen.
There was only a narrow bridge between the two sides. We had boxes of books,
typewriters etc. and we were no good with pushing, pulling or carrying heavy
things. We struggled quite a bit over such a short distance. The border
check-point was manned by PLA soldiers who were very stern and strict. Their
job was to guard the motherland from attacks by enemies. They were highly
suspicious of this group of teachers carrying loads like unskilled porters. I
showed the soldier in charge the letter from the Education Bureau Head and
explained in the best of my Mandarin (Putonghua) which was only barely
comprehensible. In the end, after an hour of so, we were allowed in, together
with all our books and handouts.
We took the train to Guangzhou, a very slow
train at that time, and were all soaked in sweat in the stuffy compartment.
When we finally reached the school dormitory, we unpacked and trained ourselves
to get used to the crude environment. The toilets were whitewashed, but there
was still an open ditch and we could see others using the toilet.
We were so very hot and really longed for a
shower. We asked about the location of the bathroom and were shown a square (15
ft x 15 ft) walled structure outside the dorm rooms on the ground floor. We
looked in and found ten showers with no partitions. This meant that we would
see each other’s bodies while taking the shower! What a cultural shock for all
of us, male or female. We had to quickly decide what to do with this provision.
We let the men take the shower first and urged them to spend only 30 minutes
for the whole group. Then we women went up to pack. Some used their swimming
suits and some raincoats. In the end we all took our refreshing shower in some
kind of “privacy”.
Our first lunch was another shock for us.
We saw the teachers queuing up each with a big mug and they had a big scoop of
rice and another scoop of meshed vegetables with tiny bits of meat inside. When
we were watching, the school leaders took us into a classroom. There were 4 big
tables with 8 big dishes on each, fish, meat, chicken, soup etc. We protested.
We did not want to be treated as “unequal”. We wanted to share the meal money
with the teachers so that they could eat a little big better. But this time,
our protest bounced onto a stone wall. We had to accept this polite gesture
from our hosts. But we urged them not to cook so much so as not to waste food.
We had classes in the normal classrooms
with old chairs and desks and a weak fan that might stop in any minute. Our
trainees were from all over Guangdong province, with 2 to 5 key teachers from
each county. Those up on the mountains in Hainan (that was part of Guangdong
then) found the environment very much “advanced and comfortable” while some
others found it similar to their own situations. They were very enthusiastic in
attending our classes and were very grateful to us. They were a bit puzzled why
we sacrificed our summer vacation to come to such a place to teach them. As
time went by they were so happy to have us as their teachers and we shared a
lot about teaching and learning.
Our teaching was very much appreciated. We
were using the new situational approach and growing out of the structural
approach in Hong Kong at that time. But in schools in the mainland they were
using the grammar translation approach before the Cultural Revolution. So our
demonstration lessons, using Hong Kong textbooks, were new, stimulating and
interesting to the participants. We lectured on methodologies, showed them how
we teach by involving them as “students” in our classes and we played language
games in the evening. We also sat together to share our feelings, responses to
life challenges and even family problems. In the end, some of us made good
friends with teachers who may be miles away teaching on hill tops in Hainan
Island.
We brought along our prepared “course book”
or collection of handouts. But when we learnt of the real situations in their
classes, we had to quickly prepare new handouts to answer questions from our
teacher trainees. We did that in the evening and some of us who were not
teaching helped to type out the handouts on the wax paper and print out the
handouts using the ink and rollers we took along. So these crude handouts were
ready sometimes at 2 a.m. Life was not easy for us. Nor was it for the mainland
teachers. Some of them had to take their children along because the other
halves had no summer vocation. We played with the few children who were waiting
patiently when they mothers had classes.
Early 1980’s ELT in Zhaoqing for key
teachers in middle schools in Guangdong province
The teacher training in Guangzhou seemed
very successful. Cadres from the Guangdong Education Bureau began to ask about
the next year’s training at the end of the course. We kept in touch. Towards
the start of the Spring Term, we were told that the new campus of the Normal
College in Zhaoqing should be finished before summer and that we could have a
better teaching environment like lecture theatres in there. The dorms should be
new and clean. We were excited because we would like to use the new toilets.
The recruitment for voluntary teachers was
equally successful and soon we had a team of 30-40 teachers, some ELT and some
support and secretariat. We started our preparation in Hong Kong. This time we
had a much better idea of what was needed in Guangdong. We could give
orientation talks to new comers to prevent cultural shocks.
Again we brought along equipment as well as
teaching materials. We also got ELT staff talented in music and took guitars
with us. We had better living conditions this time, but it was still extremely
hot even in the countryside.
When we had classes, everyone was sweating.
The male teachers just had their vests on. The female teachers rolled up their
long pants. Everyone was fanning while listening. When we gave lectures we
could see a sea of fans like waves moving up and down.
As Zhaoqing was a scenic spot famous for
its karst scenery we had a great time cycling around after class to visit the
caves, streams and hills. Tourism was not very developed at that time and we
had the natural stalactites and stalagmites all to ourselves.
We conducted the English training course
for 3 weeks eating, learning, working, bathing and living with all the teachers
from different provinces. This time as we were in the countryside, we seemed to
have better vegetables and fish for the whole group, not just the teacher
trainers. We were happy to see the improvement. We sang a lot of folk songs in
the evening.
At this time, people talked about English teaching and foreign
language teaching as if they meant the same. In fact, some teachers of foreign
language teachers were teachers of Russian, not English. We could not get these
teachers to use communicative or situational approaches because their English
proficiency was not that good. Actually we had to give some quick remedial
classes to these teachers. We had to run some additional language classes for
this small group. They appreciated our efforts in helping them.
The best part of the course was the evening
language games. As we had some teachers very good in singing they made everyone
join in at ease when they played their guitars and sang. Learning English
through songs was a great method.
After our Zhaoqing teacher training, there
were more Hong Kong groups and organizations volunteering to help Guangdong. I
stopped organizing my team because the need was satisfied. Also I felt that I
was not that qualified to do the job and went to English to further my studies.
1992 Technical Assistance of the
Education component under the World Bank Loan Project of Changzhou
I became involved in teacher training again when The Chinese
University of Hong Kong’s Education Faculty was invited to run the Technical
Assistance of the Education component under the World Bank Loan Project in 3
medium-size cities in China. I was asked to help with English teacher training
in Changzhou, a city very close to Nanjing.
This time I did not prepare the course with Hong Kong teachers.
Instead, I was asked to have meetings with professors from the Education Faculty
of East China Normal University to find out what would be needed by teachers
working in medium-size cities along the Yangtze River. I went to Shanghai to
meet with the professors twice before I prepared the teaching materials. I also
got more systematic information about ELT at that time.
This is a translation of an official document that I got from the
library of Changzhou. By this time, ELT was more developed and a number of
cities actually looked overseas to improve their local situations.
The Education Bureau issued a document (013) on “strengthening
foreign language teaching” and stated that for middle schools with adequate
staff, they should normally start English teaching in junior one. For middle
schools without enough teachers, for instance, schools in remote villages, they
can start English teaching in senior one. English teaching takes up 6 hours per
week, that is 6 x 34 week = 204 class hours in the first year.
Teachers were asked to teach reading, writing, listening and
speaking. But for those in remote areas starting English in senior one, they
were asked to focus on reading ability and self-learning ability aiming for
students to learn 1800 vocabulary items so as to be able to read things with
the aid of a dictionary.
This time, everything was very organized. The officers from
Education Bureau as well as some teachers in key schools helped to make sure
materials could be printed in time. We
could just scribble down things and they had people to type them out and print
for us. So we did not need to worry about clerical support. There was an
overhead projector in the classroom and we could use our slides to supplement
our lectures.
But Changzhou, like Nanjing, was a furnace in summer with
temperature reaching 43 degrees Celsius/ Centigrade. Whenever the temperature reached 40+ degrees, factories would
suspend work because it was considered dangerous for the workers and the
machines. But we were not to follow this rule. In order to overcome the problem
of high temperature, we held our training classes in tunnels deep underground.
It was cool and comfortable there. These were dug in the days when Chairman Mao
mobilized the whole country to dig deep tunnels to protect lives should be
there be a war with the imperialist invaders. We found it acceptable to teach 2
to 3 floors below ground level, but many of the key teachers did not like this
arrangement. Many of our trainees were smokers. However, smoking was not
allowed inside the tunnels as there would not enough oxygen and the smell would
stay there for a long time to come.
Eventually we moved to a school nearer to the hillside with a nice
breeze. That helped to make life bearable for us. When we went out to visit
some street stalls, we could only see cold noodles sold. When some of our male
teachers asked for a cold beer, they were told there was none. They managed to
buy a bottle of beer, but it felt warm. When they opened it, carbon dioxide
blew up with the beer because it could not stay dissolved in such a high
temperature. Female teachers from Hong Kong used a wet towel to cover up their
heads to lower the temperature and male teachers had to take off their shirts
and have their vests on like the locals. We had a bit of the taste of the “three
furnaces of China”.
There was a village teacher who impressed us most. She was teaching
in a village far away from
the city. She came to Changzhou Education Bureau to ask if there were training
courses in the summer. Since she was not from any key schools she was not
eligible for the course. But she asked to be an observer and cycled to our
course one and a half hours from her village each way. When we complained about
the heat, she cycled 3 hours under the sun every day in order to come to learn.
We were really touched by her perseverance.
We followed the Hong Kong procedure for this training course and had
an end-of-course evaluation. Participants were happy with the provision and
they all gave A’s in the anonymous questionnaire survey. We kept in touch with
some of these teacher trainees answering language questions mostly. It was a
very good experience for us. This time we were paid even though we felt that we
should have offered the course free of charge.
2005 Training English teachers in Gansu
This time it was another voluntary service. A group of teachers from
a Non-Government Organization took English books and went to a small city in
Gansu to help. In this city, there was a big lecture hall with satellite
connection, projectors, computers, sound system and proper chairs and tables. All
these came as a donation from the European Community—very nice setting for
teacher development. The satellite was linked to the Extension College of
Tsinghua University and could show live lectures there. So the aim was for
teachers in rural areas in remote Gansu to have the same kind of educational
input as participants in Beijing and thus to narrow the gap in teacher
development in far away places with technology.
We listened to the 2-hour lecture with the participants in the
morning. Then we explained to them again because there needed to be more
background information for the Gansu teachers to understand more fully. As the
morning lectures were in Putonghua (Mandarin) I only helped in the afternoon
session when participants split into subject groups. Again I worked with local
English language teachers using books, wall pictures and quick chalkboard
drawings to show how to deal with various themes or language items. We brought
along very good language tapes which could expose them to native English speaking.
But we were told that the tapes would not be useful because electricity was
expensive and batteries were even more expensive. Our donating the tapes and
tape recorders would not be used as schools had no money for that. That
explained why teachers spoke English with a very strong local accent.
In this remote area we met with toilet problems again. When we asked
about the toilets we were led to the back of the big lecture hall. There about
50 meters away was a crudely built house, a stand alone with no windows. We
walked to that building and found a small door facing the far side. When we
walked in, we did not find long ditches like those we saw in Zhixin School in
Guangzhou. Instead we saw a few holes on the ground. When we looked down we
found that the holes led to an open ground 2 floors down. It seemed that the
toilet was built on an overhanging “cliff” and this was the kind of “dry toilet”
common in the desert areas. Whatever passed out from the human body would drop
about 6 metres down to the ground. But if any thin person was not careful
he/she might drop straight down through the hole to the pile of dung.
Here we were taken by car to a nearby hotel where we stayed for our
meals. Our participants went home for their meals. They were kind, honest
people easy to get along with. But neither they nor their students liked to
study English, failing to see the need for it. We did our best to engage them
and hopefully they could do the same with their students. At the end of the
summer course, we were good friends. Some of the participants brought along
musical instruments of the NW and played us local tunes. Some took us home and
made us local bread and goat soup. We were very much moved by the hospitality.
We knew that we were in the same team, teachers to make China better, no matter
where we were from.
2010 English training for key teachers in middle schools in Zhuhai
This was a very different scenario.
Zhuhai, a special economic zone just north of Macao, had industries manned by
people from different parts of the world. Here everyone could see the relevance
of using English as a lingua franca to communicate. Teachers in Zhuhai had much
better English standards than those I helped train in the north-west. These
teachers were eager to learn, active in all activities and ready to try out new
methodologies. They had better English course books and story books as well.
They could go on the Internet to look for materials. Surely, there had been a
lot of web-based development from 2005 to 2010 and I think teachers in the NW
are also using the Internet to connect to the rest of China.
The Education Bureau of Zhuhai was eager
to help teachers to further improve their English teaching capabilities.
Teachers were asked to join refresher courses offered by universities in
Guangzhou. In 2010, the Bureau invited teachers at BNU-HKBU United
International College to run an intensive summer refresher for teachers from
key middle schools.
Even though these teachers were quite
fluent in English, we found that few of them had read things in English apart
from their course books. So we bought one book for each and asked them to
exchange them when they finished reading. Many of them had never read a real
book before. They had only read simplified things for non-native learners. They
were quite fascinated by this idea and at the end of the course they made good
presentations about the books.
We used the computer a lot for this
course. Teacher trainees sent in their written work via our iSpace (an Internet
sharing platform) and our lecturers corrected their work online. They also
asked questions by emails and even the shy ones raised questions and shared
their thoughts.
For this course, we talked about
different methodologies in the morning sessions, had practical workshops or
language activities in the afternoon and online writing or reading in the
evenings. Teachers had to use English throughout the course. They also need to
put up a performance in English in the closing ceremony. They practised their
performance whenever they found some free time. We could see improvements in
the participants in a matter of 3 weeks. They could also see their jump in English
proficiency. The end-of-course evaluation was very positive. We felt that an English
immersion environment like this was a great way to improve or maintain teachers’
language standards.
At the end of course, participants took
photos with the lecturers and that was a moving scene. This time the
participants used their smart phones and soon the photos were forwarded to many
people. That is a great advancement in China from the 1970’s when we had an
official photographer to take a group photo. No teacher was rich enough to own
a camera.
Again teachers made great friends with
the lecturers and they still send in questions by emails when they find
questions in their teaching.
