NNS Teacher and SSL Students
August 10, 2010
The title reads: “Non-native speaker teacher and second language learner students”.
This past week I have started teaching kids, and while I can’t say that I have any bad students in any of my classes, I’m frustrated that I’m forced to grapple around the language barrier. Or rather, the language barrier with early language learners.
Before I started, I asked a colleague “how do you get the get the kids to sit in a circle?”. I mean, if I’m teaching them greetings like “hello” and “what’s your name?”, I can’t just tell them to sit in a circle. My answers to this question have been to mime or model the activity. Now, imagine that you’re teaching a class and you’re trying to order 10 kids to follow a simple activity without the aid of language. Naturally, by virtue of the fact that I can’t just say “get in a circle”, I’m going to waste time fumbling about trying to not only get the kids in a circle but get them to understand the basic rules of the game…
…and this is what pisses me off about teaching kids: why am I doing it when clearly a native Chinese speaker could complete the activity without fuss or complication? In my mind, there’s little benefit to having a native speaker churn out simple English. The authenticity of my language or my presence itself does not outweigh the fact that I “cannot” give out simple instructions.
Fortunately, I can give out instructions in Chinese, because unlike the other teachers I can speak Chinese, but it doesn’t help since the kids are not primed to hear the teacher speak Chinese, so any of my Chinese spoken in class will likely be interpreted as English of which the students themselves don’t understand: a problem unto itself. Furthermore, like the majority of Chinese people, the students either lavish praise upon or fail to understand Chinese which is spoken from the mouth of someone outside of their own nationality. (Even though some Australians might dish out flak to non-native speakers, we accept that they can speak our language as opposed to the Chinese whose view of the world’s ethnicities in the lens of archaic stereotypes. (Thank God I’m not a black man!)).
The other part of my frustration stems not just from discipline but lathering the kids up for education. As I learnt from my teaching assistant for my toddler class “you need to make the kids happy and then teach them”. Happiness equates to games and games I do not like. I was employed to teach English, not to let the kids colour in or run around. I paraphrase my American workmate in saying, if the kids can sit in class and listen to their Chinese teacher for an hour, then they can sit down a listen to me an hour. But games are pivotal to teaching kids, or so the culture tells me. I don’t like this, in my eyes it’s time wasting, the stuff lazy teachers do, the stuff my expensive CELTA course would disregard and most of all, a highly unorthodox way of teaching English. At least it’s not the other way around, at least I can nail the exposition, now I just need to appease the inner child.
Waving my arms about to convey instructions or playing games makes me feel like a joke. I don’t want to manage or lather people into education, I want to educate. At least I only have 4-6hrs of this a week and most of my students 10 and above are well above their age in maturity.
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For your consideration, a blog about video games as written by myself:
