Musings on teaching English to my Chinese students.

It continues to be great fun teaching my students conversational English.  As part of their work, I assign them weekly prompts to be used for short skits that they present before the class.  

I have started recording their performances with my iPhone so I can go back over their work and find the spots that I could not understand.  I hate to interrupt their performances.  I’m starting realize now that so much of communication is based on expectations.  Sometimes I just don’t expect them to say the things they are going to say.  

A couple of weeks ago the general topic for conversation related to “addictive substances”.  I asked that one of the students in their conversation pairs play a concerned friend and the other play someone who was possibly developing a drug addiction problem.  One of my “potentially addicted” students said something like: “Sometimes I like to go to the clubs and have my XXX XXX me like knights looking up their XXX.”  Only, she said this very fast and I couldn’t understand all the words.  I watched the video 4 or 5 times and still couldn’t get it.  Did she really say “knights” or is she talking about “nights”?  

Later, I met with her and her conversation partner at my office and we reviewed the video together.  Come to find out she actually said, “Sometimes I like to go to clubs and have my adoring fans worship me like knights looking up at their princess.  It feels like paradise.”  This was to illustrate her somewhat manic state at the club!  So, I was pretty close to getting it.  We went over some of the words she had difficulty pronouncing as well as the rhythm and cadences of her sentences.  By the end, she was saying her lines clearly and confidently.  

I told her how impressed I was with her imaginative, colorful language and that I would be listening for that in the future.  

What fun it is to work with such creative and motivated students!  Seeing the world through their eyes has been one of the great joys of this gig.