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Pei Wei Feng answers a question during adult English class

Since the beginning of the school year, Sara Lam and I have been leading an adult English class every Tuesday and Thursday at Guan Ai Primary. The class was created because teachers at Guan Ai, English and otherwise, expressed interest in improving their English skills. From the beginning, seven teachers, or half of the teaching staff, have faithfully attended the class. I thought many teachers would initially be interested in the class, but I expected their attendance to fall off as their classes became busier or they became discouraged in their language skills, but thankfully they stuck with our class and it has become one of the most satisfying components of the work I do at Guan Ai.

When we started the class, we were not sure how it would operate; Sara had a little experience teaching adults and I had none. The first thing we planned to do was assess the teachers. As I expected, the teachers had quite large vocabularies; however, they did not have the capacity to use the words in conversation. This is the result of how English has traditionally been taught in China. Students are taught “mute English” where they learn how to read and write with minimal speaking practice. Considering this, we decided that the main goal of the class would be to improve the conversational skills and pronunciation of the teachers, while also supplementing their vocabularies. Initially, we started by choosing topics of interest to the teachers, like food, and teaching the relevant vocabulary words and then trying to facilitate English conversations. This worked with minimal success. It was difficult to get teachers to speak beyond directly answering our questions. Instead of operating like a conversation, it was more like taking turns trying to answer our questions. If the teachers were going to remain interested in the class, something needed to change.

Sara and Sun Laoshi, a headmaster at Guan Ai and also one of our English students, traveled to Dulangkou Middle School in late October for a professional development conference. While they were gone, I was in charge of teaching the class by myself. I was a little nervous about the class because I didn’t speak Mandarin well and the teachers usually had questions that require translation. I thought for a long time about the lesson and came up with the idea of drawing a map of Guan Ai Primary and teaching the words for locations around the school. The content ended up being far too easy for the teachers, but somehow the lesson was much better than previous ones. Giving the teachers content that related to their teaching and their school made the conversation much livelier and it also was likely to be used in my daily interactions with them outside of our class. When Sara returned from the trip, I informed her how well the lesson had gone and we recognized this as a breakthrough in the class. From that point on, our classes have mainly been focused on teaching and education. This has given the teachers chances to practice speaking English while also having conversations about their students, frustrations at work, methods for classroom management, etc.

In addition to being a place for teachers to learn English, the class has also become a platform for Sara and I to model our teaching and encourage participatory methods. After the teachers started to become more comfortable speaking in our class, we started to employ different kinds of activities that the teachers can try out in their classes. We often use games and competitions or generate conversation by creating hypothetical situations, debates or role-playing activities. After seeing how these activities are used in the adult class, the teachers are more willing to try them out with their own students.

According to the recent evaluation we conducted in class, the teachers all feel that their English has improved and all of them want to continue the class next year.